Realworld Systems and Cortex® supports Orange Romania in accelerating its automation journey for IT operations

Written by Paul on 18 January 2021. Posted in General news items.

Realworld Systems and Cortex® support Orange Romania in accelerating its automation journey for IT operations

By Kate Evans – Cortex

Realworld Systems and Cortex® are proud to be one of the main partners of Orange Romania supporting and accelerating their automation journey for IT operations.

Orange Romania is future-proofing its IT operations to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Intelligent Automation will enable Orange to accelerate their evolution with new technologies, manage increasingly complex networks, and support next-generation load. The strategic move to automation centric operations will ensure continuing service delivery excellence through increased efficiency, reliability, and placing customer experience at the heart of operations.

To facilitate this, Orange Romania turned to Realworld Systems, a world-wide integrator that builds, sells, and implements intelligent solutions to accelerate digital transformation with who they have a trusted working relationship.

“Business expectations from IT are quite straightforward: simplicity, fast time to market, performance and reliability. Discussing with different IT leaders, always the same question arises: how to transform your organization to achieve these “straightforward” expectations?

Achieving simplicity and fast time to market without trading off performance and reliability, (unintuitively) means that your IT ecosystem gets even more complex. Therefore, one of the key ingredients is cultivating and nurturing an automation mindset inside your organization. Automation has to come by design!

In Orange Romania we are quite advanced in the automation journey (CI/CD, IaC, intelligent operations, etc), however, we consider it key to accelerate even more the automation of our end-to-end process.

Cortex and RealWorld are one of our main partners in this automation journey, proposing the strategies, methods and technology that will make this journey a success. After less than 3 months, we are starting to see the results and they are quite impressive!” Horia Stefanescu, Head of IT Operations, Orange Romania

“Automation is a central point inside the IT operations Strategy, as part of our digital transformation, with great focus and commitment from all the involved parties. We believe that through intelligent automation we can achieve our goal to deliver reliable and seamless services to our customers. Besides the tool, which is also important, we needed partners who can support us through the automation journey and empower us with the right methodologies in order to implement automation efficiently and timely.

Together with Realworld Systems and Cortex, we can achieve our goal to implement intelligent automation by using the best combination between the tool and mindset.” Marian Merisescu, Lead Automation Architect, Orange Romania

The Realworld Systems ethos, of supporting companies on a strategic, tactical, and operational level, mirrors the Cortex mission of a “World where everyone can automate” through technological accessibility and innovations in strategies and methodologies for success in Intelligent Automation. The partnership came together following TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World 2019. It combines two decades of Realworld Systems’ extensive experience in digital transformation with the industry-leading innovation of Cortex’s and two decades of success in developing and delivering Intelligent Automation software.

“We are delighted that Orange Romania selected Realworld and Cortex for delivering the solution for automating its IT Operations landscape. This is just the beginning of a journey that aims for a radical business transformation that will allow Orange to deal with the increasing complexity of its IT Operations and Network landscape. Realworld is committed to assist its long-time customer Orange Romania, and to deliver the best strategies and methodologies in implementing intelligent automation,” Bogdan Hebean, Business Development Lead at RealWorld Systems said.

A proven, unique engagement process began in late 2019, with a Cortex Kickstarter™ project that goes beyond a traditional POC. In two days, this provides a rapid prototype intelligent automation solution, applied in context for Orange. The initial automation focus of IT Ops was driven by the ongoing convergence of IT and network operations. With impending pressure from new technologies such as 5G, SDN, NFV, microservices and cloud transformation, IT infrastructure is ever more vital to underpin service operations. Phase one of the intelligent automation initiative, a Cortex Launch Program™, guarantees tangible outcomes within 3 months.

“The future of work where intelligent machines can share the burden of ever more complex, and demanding operations. We are excited to be bringing the strategies, methods, and technology we have developed over the last 3 decades to enable Orange to be successful in this transformation. Our experience in major communication service providers combined with intelligent automation will provide Orange with the accelerate the release of the highly skilled workforce to support the evolving world of 5G, SDN, NFV, cloud transformation and microservices,” Jonathan Hobday, Commercial Director at Cortex, concludes.

Realworld Eastern Europe and CROSS selected by AFR-IX

Written by Mirjan Koolen on 2 July 2020. Posted in General news items.

CROSS selected by pan-African carrier AFR-IX to boost operational performance.

Gearing up for growth – moving from open source to centralised network inventory management

Recently, we closed a contract with a fast-growing, pan-African carrier and service provider, AFR-IX. Our new client has built an advanced, Cisco-based network to deliver connectivity services across the African continent. The portfolio includes L2/L3 services, direct internet access, international private leased circuits, as well as managed co-location services.

With a growing footprint of data centres and surging customer demand for reliable, cost-effect connectivity solutions, AFR-IX had enjoyed great success. However, managing this growing footprint began to present challenges.

In particular, the ability to deliver new services, quickly and easily, while delivering promised SLAs became increasingly difficult for AFR-IX. Both factors are key differentiators against established and incumbent providers, with legacy processes. Maintaining the operational and service agility became a key strategic goal for the leadership team.

From open source to a proven, future-proof, consolidated solution

Until recently, AFR-IX had relied on an open-source inventory management solution across its growing footprint. However, this had a number of limitations which negatively impacted operational performance – and created barriers to future growth. To retain competitive advantage, the carrier decided to invest in a new, centralised solution.

We’re thrilled to announce that CROSS has been chosen by AFR-IX, and will become the new, consolidated common inventory platform to help support the carrier’s growth and performance optimisation plans.

As a result of the deployment, all network components – switches and routers – will be integrated with CROSS. The auto-discovery tools will enable detailed information regarding resource availability and location (for example, devices, cards, ports and transceivers) to be obtained, when required – accelerating deployment times.

The project is in its early stages but will also extend to CRM integration for sales and order management, with automation planned as an additional step to create zero-touch processes.

All in all, it’s an exciting project that takes CROSS to another network operator that’s seeking to build competitive advantage – AFR-IX. Watch this space for future updates!

Groundwater Office at Water Corporation

Written by Mirjan Koolen on 25 June 2020. Posted in Blog posts, General news items.

Groundwater asset information was previously stored across multiple systems within Water Corporation. This data was managed by various business units creating duplication of information and the loss of information considered not important. Investigations relating to groundwater were thus time consuming and resource heavy creating delays in providing advice and additional time allocations/rework for each project. Further, some regulatory commitments were not being entirely met and quality assurances of the data could not be guaranteed.

The catalyst for change was caused when a production bore in the Leederville aquifer was proposed within the Whitfords Borefield to provide flexibility in Perth’s Integrated Water Supply Scheme. However, a Leederville bore had been previously been drilled at this site identifying unsuitable water quality. The report identifying the water quality was not easily accessible and only a casual conversation at the planning phase identified the issue. This resulted in a cost avoidance of ~$2,500,000 in rework associated with completing a production well in this area and saving 6-9 months in project delay.

Water Corporation investigated several products that would provide:

A central data source that could provide a ‘Source of Truth’ on hydrogeological information;
Ability to capture all information in a consistent approach (QA/QC);
Integration with the Asset Registration process; and
A tool for ongoing Asset Management and Operations.

Water Corporation identified a combination of Smallworld’s Groundwater Office and GeODin software as the preferred solution. In addition, Groundwater Office (GWO) provided the ability to link with other databases to provide a ‘One-Stop-Shop’, in particular ODSS which stores water quality and summarised operational data.

GeODin is a platform designed to aid with a consistent approach to documentation of hydrogeological and drilling data. The system provides a method by which all those involved in groundwater investigations and drilling data acquisition, analysis and reporting may remain aligned with a consistent and proper documentation standard. It also allows for consultants to have a tool for direct input of data into Water Corporations system without the need for double handling of the data.

GWO is the repository of groundwater bore/well related data which can then be utilised with other programs throughout Water Corporation. It is connected to SAP, Water Office, and ODSS to ensure there is a single point of truth for all data and has the ability to output data into specifically designed reports within GWO or other programs including Datalab and GeODin.

Even though the current migration and use of GWO is still in its infancy, significant efficiencies have already been seen on a day-to-day review of data. The biggest challenge has been aligning the data within several databases into one repository, especially where conflicting information may exist. Changes have been completed on an incremental basis: firstly inputting the data into GWO; secondly aligning with asset registration information; thirdly the inclusion of new data; and finally an iterative approach to ongoing QA/QC of data. This method has meant that while data currently may not be accurate, consistency across different systems has now occurred and allows for changes to be made in one location, GWO, which can then be reflected across the different systems.

GWO also has significant functionality that is currently not being utilised. With its highly flexible framework allowing for complex queries, the data can be interrogated in infinite ways allowing for the system to be set up for risk assessments and asset management. The ability to store specific filters allows for regular tasks to be set up and saved by more experienced administrative users, making the queries available for general users at the click of a button. Its flexibility with connecting to other databases will also allow for all data collected by Water Corporation to potentially be available within the one database.