Telefónica and Wipro on Wednesday announced an agreement to initiate the transformational journey towards Network Operations by introducing Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment and Continuous Testing (CI/CD/CT) in Telefonica’s German and Brazilian markets, with the perspective of expansion to Spain and UK.
With 5G, born cloud native and based on containers and microservices, suppliers have endorsed a CI/CD/CT approach in their industrialization process dramatically increasing the number of product releases and the volume of testing. Operators need to be radically agile to face this new situation without compromising the right level of quality, performance, scalability and time to market.
Telefonica plans to leverage a common CI/CD/CT framework for all the markets which can be implemented locally to meet specific local integration needs, with the support of Wipro. This will ease collaboration among Telefonica OpCos allowing to share design, parametrization/configuration, test plans and results.
The solution, developed by Wipro, will be built over opensource tools and open to evolution, allowing rapid adaptation to future technological changes. Common repository test tools will also be used, with the possibility of future integration with the CI/CD/CT pipeline.
Wipro will work with Telefonica to automate the associated Network Operations and, thus, enable the transition to the Telco Cloud and the adoption of the virtualized Network Functions. This framework will allow for industrialization of the process, coping with the increased volume and complexity of the Network Functions while adopting an Agile working methodology in parallel to the industry.
Although the initial target is 5G Core Network, the strategy is to expand the solution to other areas such as Transport, Access and Infrastructure.
Furthermore, Telefonica and Wipro will collaborate in implementing and incorporating the CI/CD/CT framework in the Telefonica Technology & Automation Lab (based in Madrid). Wipro will support Telefónica in implementing different use cases over Telco Cloud environments and will build an automated and programmable environment based on Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning where both partners will work jointly with the objective to achieve Zero touch network testing and deployment without a maintenance window.
Thomas Braun, Manager Test Environments & Integration, Telefónica Germany
With Wipro, we have chosen a service provider that can build converged solutions for us to optimally serve all technology segments. Fast, reliable and standardized automation of all tasks from build to production will improve our time to market as well as service quality.
Cayetano Carbajo, Director of Core, Service Platforms and Transport, Telefonica CTIO
CI/CD/CT is a must in our 5G strategy enabling the robustness and reliability of our Network while ensuring adaptability and accelerating the time to market. This is one of the key steps in the path of automation of our networks. We see Wipro as the best partner for this journey given the knowhow and the experience we have in some other projects of automation like SDN implementation.
