Gartner defines the market of AI in communications service provider (CSP) network operations as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products with offerings in the form of capabilities embedded in CSP-specific operational technology (OT) applications or industry-agnostic horizontal applications. These products enable AI/ML-based network operations in CSPs. AI in CSP network operations helps CSPs to increase their network efficiency and performance, while reducing costs. CSPs are also evaluating use of AI in network operations to manage their energy consumption.
AIOps platforms analyze telemetry and events, and identify meaningful patterns that provide insights to support proactive responses. AIOps platforms have five characteristics: Cross-domain data ingestion and analytics Topology assembly from implicit and explicit sources of asset relationship and dependency Correlation between related or redundant events associated with an incident Pattern recognition to detect incidents, their leading indicators or probable root cause Association of probable remediation
“Application testing services” is a comprehensive term for the verification and validation services that support quality control and quality assurance (QA) of clients’ applications. Verification assesses whether a product/application or service complies with regulations, requirements, specifications or enforced constraints. Validation typically involves engagement with external customers to confirm suitability and acceptance. Infrastructure testing services, mobile device testing and software testing tools created for the market by independent software vendors (ISVs) are not included in this definition.
Gartner defines CSP service design and orchestration (SD&O) solutions as part of operations support system (OSS). It’s a set of products/offerings that enable CSPs to design, fulfill and orchestrate services for their clients in various market segments such as consumer, enterprise and wholesale. These solutions include service design tools; policy tools; orchestration solutions; and inventories, provisioning and activation tools for use in physical, virtual, containerized and hybrid network environments.
Reviews for 'Cloud Computing - Others'
Cloud management tooling enables organizations to manage hybrid and multicloud (that is, on-premises, public cloud and edge) services and resources. This includes providing governance, life cycle management, brokering and automation for managed cloud infrastructure resources across multiple functional areas. The tooling can be procured and operated by central IT organizations, such as I&O, cloud center of excellence (CCOE) and platform engineering/operations, or within specific lines of business. It can be deployed on-premises, in a customer’s public cloud account or purchased as a SaaS.
Gartner defines container management as offerings that enable the deployment and operation of containerized workloads. Delivery methods include stand-alone software or as a service. Delivery methods include cloud, managed service and software for containers running on-premises, in the public cloud and/or at the edge. Container management automates the provisioning, operation and life cycle management of containerized workloads at scale. Centralized governance and security policies are used to manage container workloads and associated resources. Container management supports the requirements of modern applications (also refactoring legacy applications), including platform engineering, cloud management and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Benefits include improved agility, elasticity and access to innovation.
Reviews for 'Data Center - Others'
DCO/HIMS is composed of the following Data center outsourcing services: Managed services for traditional data center (DC) environments: Mainframe managed services ERP hosting managed services Managed servers and network equipment Managed services for hosted and private cloud infrastructure Managed services for public cloud and edge environments: Hybrid infrastructure managed services Data center consolidation and transformation services Cloud migration services This complex set of data center capabilities and services is increasingly based on managed virtual private cloud services plus hyperscale public cloud services. It is managed via a mix of remote infrastructure management (RIM) services leveraging traditional tools, cloud management platforms (CMPs), and intelligent automation and/or hyperautomation.
Gartner defines a data science and machine learning platform as an integrated set of code-based libraries and low-code tooling that support the independent use by, and collaboration between, data scientists and their business and IT counterparts through all stages of the data science life cycle. These stages include business understanding, data access and preparation, experimentation and model creation, and sharing of insights. They also support machine learning engineering workflows including creation of data, feature, deployment and testing pipelines. The platforms are provided via desktop client or browser with supporting compute instances and/or as a fully managed cloud offering. Data science and machine learning (DSML) platforms are designed to allow a broad range of users to develop and apply a comprehensive set of predictive and prescriptive analytical techniques. Leveraging data from distributed sources, cutting-edge user experience, and native machine learning and generative AI (GenAI) capabilities, these platforms help to augment and automate decision making across an enterprise. They provide a range of proprietary and open-source tools to enable data scientists and domain experts to find patterns in data that can be used to forecast financial metrics, understand customer behavior, predict supply and demand, and many other use cases. Models can be built on all types of data, including tabular, images, video and text for applications that require computer vision or natural language processing.
Gartner defines file and object storage platforms as software and/or hardware platforms that offer object and distributed file system technologies for storing and managing unstructured data over NFS, SMB and Amazon S3 access protocols. File and object storage platforms store, secure, protect and scale an organization’s unstructured data with access over the network using protocols such as NFS, SMB and Amazon S3. Use cases include analytics, workload consolidation, backup and archiving, hybrid cloud, object-native applications, cloud IT operations, and high-performance files.
Full-stack HCI software provides a complete software solution that includes virtualized compute, storage and networking from a single instantiation designed to run on-premises or in a colocation environment. This market consists of those vendors that develop and sell hyperconverged infrastructure software that comprises the vendor’s own server virtualization, software-defined storage and network management tools. The full-stack software solution may also be integrated with a hardware stack as a complete offering spanning both software and hardware. In the last year, the full-stack HCI market has been heavily influenced by the positioning of storage virtualization and private cloud infrastructure looking to revirtualize compute, as well as considering alternatives to incumbent vendors.
Hadoop distributions are used to provide scalable, distributed computing against on-premises and cloud-based file store data. Distributions are composed of commercially packaged and supported editions of open-source Apache Hadoop-related projects. Distributions provide access to applications, query/reporting tools, machine learning and data management infrastructure components. First introduced as collections of components for any use case, distributions are now often delivered as part of a specific solution for data lakes, machine learning or other uses. They subsequently grow into additional, expanded roles, competing with both older technologies like database management systems (DBMSs) and newer ones like Apache Spark.
Gartner defines the IT asset disposition (ITAD) market with three service categories: core disposition services, secondary hardware services and ancillary life cycle services. Core disposition services are essential to ITAD processes and evaluated on a make-or-buy scale. Secondary hardware services involve acquiring used equipment from ITAD providers. Ancillary life cycle services, such as software harvesting and redeployment, are offered by full-service ITAD providers. ITAD is crucial for IT sustainability, mitigating Scope 3 emissions and supporting the circular economy.
IT Resilience Orchestration (ITRO) solutions are chiefly aimed at helping to improve the reliability, speed and granularity of workload recovery due to unplanned outages by automating disaster recovery (DR) processes while lowering costs of DR exercising and DR operations staff. Gartner’s ITRO definition focuses on tools that support a majority of these capabilities: • Automated failover, failback and availability/continuity management • Replication and orchestration • Discovery, dependency mapping and workload analysis • DR management and run book creation • Reporting and validation of recovery capability
Gartner defines IT Services for Communication Service Providers (ITS-CSP) as multivendor IT services CSPs buy to: ■ Enable solutions to their customers, particularly enterprises ■ Transform their customer, partner, workforce, service or infrastructure management IT must deliver a cloud-first, agile, automation- and intelligence-based “digital factory” that can support broader corporate goals of product diversification, innovation, revenue growth and improved digital customer journeys. Geopolitical issues, ecosystems, transparency, trust and security are mission-critical in the uncertain world and add to the factors affecting CSPs’ competitiveness. Communications service providers want to buy and understand business outcomes over technology. They want their IT service partners to have a personal investment. CIOs in large CSPs would like to work with a smaller number of more strategic IT service partners. At the same time, business unit leaders also want to speed up their initiatives, creating possibilities for IT service providers. CSPs want help with revenue growth from enterprises, including joint go-to-market and new digital technology capabilities from IT service providers. Communications service providers expect cost-efficiency from automation, from IT enabling their networks and from using more cloud-delivered software capability. All this is underpinned by the CSP’s desire to run data-focused businesses, including digital key performance indicators (KPIs).
Gartner defines ICS as a hybrid, multidomain (i.e., on-premises, colocation, edge and public cloud), consumption-based as-a-service offerings for enterprise mission-critical infrastructure such as storage, compute and networking. In this case, multidomain reflects the characteristics of a multicloud hybrid environment. ICS vendors combine their unique capabilities to provide API-centric control and vendor-managed data services planes for infrastructure onboarding, provisioning and SLA-based life cycle management and support. ICS offerings include software-defined infrastructure solutions and appliances for storage as a service (STaaS), compute as a service (CaaS), networking as a service (NaaS), and other data services offerings. Data services include backup, disaster recovery (DR) and ransomware recovery, optionally managed by IT staff and/or service providers.
Infrastructure monitoring tools capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components, no matter where they reside (e.g., in a data center, at the edge, infrastructure as a service [IaaS] or platform as a service [PaaS] in the cloud). This enables I&O leaders to monitor and collate the availability and resource utilization data of physical and virtual entities — including servers, containers, network devices, database instances, hypervisors and storage. These tools collect data in real time and perform historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor.
Many IT infrastructure and operations leaders want to make their infrastructure services more agile and accessible via self-service. At the same time, they want a simplified, less complex implementation experience for hardware and software. As a result, I&O leaders often acquire infrastructure-centric CMPs with integrated infrastructure systems. IISs offer pre-integrated compute, storage and networking in combination with management software that typically includes IIS configuration management and monitoring. This same pattern extends to hyperconverged integrated systems (HCISs), which have a scale-out design based on commodity components to both reduce the initial acquisition price and enable pay-as-you-grow pricing, but may not offer networking capabilities in the solution.
Integrated systems combine server, shared storage and network devices, along with management software and support in a preintegrated stack. The integrated system market has four segments: integrated infrastructure system, integrated reference architecture, integrated stack system and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) segment. The overall HCI segment is further subdivided into Hyperconverged Integrated Systems (HCIS), which provides both software and hardware in an appliance model and the software only segment in which vendors provide the Hyperconverged software. This is then integrated with HW by a reseller or the end customer.
Internet of Things (IoT) services represents a set of end-to-end services in which businesses contract with external providers to design, build, install and operate IoT solutions, including advisory consulting for IoT planning. IoT service providers represent a range of small, midsize and large service firms that build and deploy IoT solution applications across industries. The focus of this market is on the medium and large service providers supporting key vertical markets for IoT adoption such as manufacturing, healthcare, transportation and retail. This market's IoT service focus aligns with the design, build and install of an IoT solution and includes IoT planning services for an IoT-enabled digital business environment.
Gartner defines observability platforms as products that ingest telemetry (operational data) from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, logs, metrics, events and traces. They are used to understand the health, performance and behavior of applications, services and infrastructure. Observability platforms enable an analysis of the telemetry, either via human operator or machine intelligence, to determine changes in system behavior that impact end-user experience such as outages or performance degradation. This allows for early, and even preemptive, problem remediation. Observability solutions are used by IT operations, site reliability engineers, cloud and platform teams, application developers, and product owners. Observability platforms are used by organizations to understand and improve the availability, performance and resilience of these critical applications and services. Investment in and successful deployment of observability platforms leads to revenue loss avoidance and enables faster product development cycles and improvements in brand perception.
An operational support system (OSS) is a set of programs that help a company in monitoring, controlling, analyzing and managing a computer network. OSS software is specifically dedicated to communications service providers and mainly used for supporting network planning, network provisioning, service fulfillment, and service assurance from a common core of service and resource management. Other functionality includes embedded analytics, correlation and aggregation, reporting, product life cycle management, multichannel support, resource and asset planning. OSS data is of strategic importance to measure the impact of operational technical processes on customer and business goals.
The primary storage platform (PSP) market addresses the need of I&O leaders to operate and support standardized enterprise storage products, along with platform-native service capabilities to support structured data applications. PSP products like primary enterprise storage arrays provide mandatory and common enterprise-class primary storage features and capabilities needed to support the platform. Platform-native services like storage as a service (STaaS) and ransomware protection, with PSP product capabilities, are required to support platform-native services. The PSP market has emerged at the convergence of two major enterprise storage market developments: the evolution of the PSP product market in conjunction with the demand for hybrid, multidomain platform-native storage services, extending on-premises services to public cloud, edge and colocation environments.