The basic enhancement to Nokia’s existing iSON is that Nokia has added more of its predictive analytics capability into the SON engine. This is the data analytics platform that underpins much of Nokia’s CEM solutions, and which the company is also extending into areas such as Predictive Marketing.
Taking customer and network data and integrating that into an optimisation solution is something that we are seeing happening by process of acquisition across the industry. This is Nokia working at a product level to combine its real time analytics with existing SON capabilities.
A trial implementation with Korea Telecom had reduced the carrier’s energy bill by 40%, Nokia’s Phil Twist said, by being able to accurately model network resources to demand and then switching off certain carriers (frequencies) over night or at times of low demand, for example.
Twist said that further use cases would be the ability to model the impact of a software release on the network, and automate a maintenance schedule over a few weeks, for example.
The iSON Manager product was announced as Nokia held its Sunday evening pre-MWC press conference. At that conference it was notable that the company was beginning to focus on benefiting from strategic cross-fertilisation between its Networks and Here and Technologies business units. CEO Rajeev Suri said the company was readying itself for the “Programmable World”. He said this would be a world “where analytics brings meaning; software brings automation”. You could argue that is precisely what SON + Analytics does for the network. Next… the world!
* A centralised SON system, as it sounds, centralises the control of key optimisation parameters to push out schedules/fixes etc on a network-wide basis. Distributed SON tends to be better suited to more local automation at the network edge – it can be quicker, but is also more limited in impact and scale. A hybrid SON solution is a mix of the two, with some network-wide decisions being automated centrally, and more location-specific optimisation automation taking place within the base station or edge element.
