Ready when you are: Blue Planet’s OSS supergroup

Joe Cumello has come a long way since his debut as lead singer in OTN Speedwagon, the house band of network technology leader Ciena.

While being in the band was exciting, drawing crowds at company events and industry conferences, it was Cumello’s startup background and then day job as CMO that led on to his elevation to General Manager for Blue Planet, Ciena’s pioneering standalone network automation and service management cloud platform.

Since his switch-up 18 months ago, Cumello has undertaken an enlightening, if less rock ‘n’ roll, world tour — meeting with customers to build relationships and open up conversations critical to establishing Blue Planet’s role in the next phase of network provider transformation.

Migration to the cloud is nowadays a well-established but far from complete journey among operators and, speaking to TelcoTitans, Cumello explains how Blue Planet has been ahead of this trend with its technology strategy over the past decade. This included fully embracing a cloud‑native approach itself, as Blue Planet prepared the groundwork for reinvention of operations support systems (OSS).

OSS is today emerging from a period when it has been rather overlooked, despite criticality to network functionality, when systems more visibly linked to customer experience or more amenable to early digitalisation have captured attention. Modernised OSS is now rightfully being placed at the heart of a software‑driven, platform‑based world where automation and AI can fundamentally re‑write the rules on what can be achieved in the telecom sector.

One thing that anyone who’s been involved with a band can recognise is that technical ability is a given. It is finding the right blend of talent that makes a group so much more than the just the sum of its parts.

With a leadership team that includes Gabriele Di Piazza, freshly joined from Google Cloud where he oversaw telco products and services as well as the hyperscaler’s own vast and innovative global network, and Kailem Anderson, who has envisioned development of its modern, streamlined OSS platform, Blue Planet has been putting together a supergroup that Cumello believes can seize the opportunity to deliver pivotal performance in the coming wave of telco transformation projects.

Di Piazza ready for telecom’s next “moment of change”

Unlike his GM, Di Piazza acknowledges he’s no musician.

The new VP of Products Alliances & Architecture for Blue Planet does, however, appreciate that timing is everything — and he is confident that he has once again found himself in the right place at the right time.

“ What attracted me here to Blue Planet is that you always want to be in a place where there’s a moment of change — because that’s where things get innovative. ”

Di Piazza.

Di Piazza particularly considers that operator transformation is entering a new phase, and arguably one more complicated than what has gone before.

He also sees OSS being upgraded to match the progress made across the rest of the telco landscape, fully opening up the opportunities of widely anticipated new technologies.

“ Operators are adding containerised network functions, adding edge, adding new services, adding slicing, adding new formats, adding multiple sites and compute into tens of thousands of nodes at the edge of the network. All of this is a massive OSS challenge. ”

Di Piazza.

Di Piazza considers himself perfectly placed to take on the OSS challenge, drawing experience together with an operator community that he sees poised to embrace the breadth of opportunity that cloud‑native networks are set to provide.

The experience he brings is considerable. Di Piazza arrived at Blue Planet from Google Cloud earlier in 2024 and has a career that has already taken him through key moments of change in a range of service provider‑linked players. This encompasses data science, AI, consumer and B2B experience and channels, networks, and virtualisation — as well as cloud.

He attributes his attuned career evolution to the fact that he is “a very, very curious person”.

Telecoms has always been at Di Piazza’s core, since completing his telecoms networks Master’s in Italy, with the ever‑expanding role of data in structured and unstructured forms another key feature of his journey.

Di Piazza became imbued with data’s significance during his stint at Microsoft, where his communications prowess broadened to incorporate media and entertainment services at a time when players were starting to embrace strategies enabling them to monetise streaming.

Tenure at tech giant HPE and data science startup Guavus (now part of Thales) followed, with Di Piazza exploring the role of Big Data in digital experience management and developing AI‑based analytics for the telco sector.

VMware was next for Di Piazza, at the time when the network virtualisation revolution was taking hold. The next industry transitional moment seized on by Di Piazza was at Google Cloud, when the virtualised 4G environment was beginning to make way for the cloud‑native world of 5G.

Explaining the rationale behind his kinetic career, Di Piazza says that “I always look at my experiences all together, adding additional pieces and bringing with me a combination of all the different pieces that I built over time”.

“ I think it would be very boring to do always the same thing, and I think that new ideas and advances come from looking at different experiences. ”

Di Piazza.

Cumello delivering his vision as Chief Translation Officer

In conversation, Cumello is a reflective leader when considering business and technology, giving consideration to broad factors that include corporate culture, purpose, and values.

This bigger picture perspective has seen him write about the value of emotional intelligence to tech companies, and he stresses that Blue Planet values skills beyond the purely technical to enable effective communication and to deliver fully on customer expectations. “You need to have both sets of tools”, he says.

Cumello has built his own Swiss Army Knife of abilities in a career that has seen him acquired by Ciena, twice.

The first acquihire was as part of a startup called Internet Photonics, which led to a seven year stint as a Ciena marketing director, before taking on another startup adventure. This drew him into the leadership of the Blue Planet software platform’s progenitor, Cyan, where he was again pulled into Ciena via dealmaking. Cumello went on to lead marketing across Ciena’s entire portfolio and organisation, before taking on the General Manager role at Blue Planet and returning to his roots.

Since being invited by Ciena’s CEO and President Gary Smith to take on shaping and advancement of Blue Planet, Cumello has been putting his belief in a rounded skillset into action. He considers that a key role for anyone in the C‑suite of a service provider, or any major business, is to “act as a translation layer between what the business ‘does’, what it ‘builds’, and ‘what the customer consumes’”. “The better you are at being that translation layer, the more successful your business can be”, he believes.

This ability to translate or interpret technology and business goals to a wide audience is now a focus for Cumello.

“ I’m talking to customers about why Blue Planet can help them solve their OSS modernisation and digital transformation journeys, and giving my employees a vision for how we’re going to go do that. There’s real power and excitement in this transition from CMO to GM in executing that vision and taking what was a translation layer for the purpose of marketing, and becoming a translation layer for a successful business. ”

Cumello.

Anderson masterminding a unified platform for take‑off

Underpinning the CSP transformation landscape envisaged by Di Piazza and Cumello is the Blue Planet platform.

This draws together the traditionally disparate — and at times nightmarish or even untouchable — mega-project elements of OSS (inventory, orchestration, assurance) into a flexible integrated cloud- and AI-native proposition that can be adopted in an agile fashion that suits the client.

Cumello sees the genetics of Blue Planet as fundamentally suited to delivery of more accommodative, virtualised network operational systems. This was originally envisioned with the aim of adopting a scalable microservice-based architecture for OSS, inspired by how Netflix rearchitected video distribution and at the time when SDN and NFV technologies were beginning to take off among telcos.

This innovation formed the basis of the original Blue Planet orchestrator at Cyan, supplemented as the vision of the business transitioned towards creating a unified cloud‑native platform. This evolution included acquisition and integration of inventory specialist DonRiver, Packet Design for network traffic route optimisation, and Centina for assurance capabilities — as well as major internal software development.

Here, the work of Kailem Anderson, Vice‑President for Global Products & Delivery at Blue Planet, is critical.

“What Kailem and the team have done from an engineering standpoint is taking those disparate platforms and unifying them into one common architecture that is now on Kubernetes and now cloud‑native”, explains Cumello. This work, he guides, has been key to Blue Planet positioning itself as the modern choice for operators transitioning to truly cloud‑native OSS.

Anderson shares that Blue Planet set out with “a very, very targeted strategy”, based on bringing together the “foundational building blocks” needed to create a world‑class platform: inventory, orchestration, order management, path computation, and assurance.

“We spent a significant portion of our R&D investment porting it to a common base”, he explains — “this type of investment was very important for us to be able to support the tier-one telcos that we are going on a journey with”.

In pursuing this vision, Anderson and Blue Planet brought together the systems developed through organic development and acquisition, and ensured the integration remained optimised as the portfolio expanded because, as Anderson noted, “otherwise it’s just silos”.

Transforming telcos don’t need fellow travellers, they need true partners

Again looking at the bigger picture, Cumello recognises that, for a new industry approach to OSS to be successful, there need to be more widespread changes happening alongside it.

For forward‑looking operators, most major business support systems abutting the customer are now cloud‑native, but that journey is still young for the operational support systems tying into the network and subscribers. This dramatic upgrade runs two fronts — modernisation and innovation — with the status quo not considered an option.

Current OSS complexity, inertia, and costs risk undermining the desired (and needed) transformation and growth by crimping available efficiencies and making new revenue options too difficult and costly to come by.

Automation in all domains will drive costs out of the network, including minimising manual processes and driving up agility to advance new services, new ideas and ultimately new revenue streams.

A consistent question Cumello is hearing around the globe is summed up as “How do I become this high agility, software‑controlled, AI‑enabled TechCo?”.

To get there, Cumello shares the vision of a “shared responsibility model” where technology partners must engage with the DevOps mindset of collaboration and continuous improvement that is increasingly prevalent within operator IT and networking functions, while simultaneously showing willingness to consider different ways to do things on a commercial basis — embracing outcome‑based, performance‑based pricing.

The old model between operators and vendors, in Cumello’s view, has for several decades been based on vendors seeking “tons and tons of money” and in return promising “huge, huge architectures”. When further customisation is necessary, this will cost the operator a lot more money. “There’s not really a shared architecture-, shared vision-, shared DevOps-type discussion going on there”, he notes.

According to Cumello, Blue Planet is now increasingly dealing with a different type of customer request, particularly among tier-one players.

“ We have to be really flexible in our willingness to decompose our relationship so that we can meet the shared vision with the customer of what they’re trying to do. Some things they want to do themselves sometimes, some things they want to use a systems integrator for sometimes. That’s where that change in the ecosystem is occurring. ”

Cumello.

An operator may want to use an element of the portfolio, but not all the associated products that traditionally form part of an integrated offering, with internal DevOps teams increasingly willing and able to take on risks around optimisation.

Cumello says Blue Planet is formulating new ways to meet this demand to support the ultimate destination envisaged by operator clients, and in doing so is creating more dynamic and valuable commercial relationships.

Blue Planet putting its people and its clients front and centre

Di Piazza also sees Blue Planet as more than just isolated technology.

Reflecting on his motivations for joining, he says he was sold on factors aside from the evident “innovative vibe and brand”, also drawing on his own experience during projects in former roles that brought him into contact with the Blue Planet way of working.

He cites an example from his days at VMware, when he was involved in the project to bring cloud‑native networks to greenfield operator DISH Networks, in which Blue Planet also played an integral part. “Any time we needed something, it was easy for me to pick up the phone and Kailem Anderson was ready to help”, he recalls.

“ The technology is important. The vision is important. The people are even more important. You meet Joe, you meet Kailem, and the rest of the team, and it’s an environment where you can innovate, and have support in doing it. ”

Di Piazza.

The new Product VP’s view suggests that Cumello’s pursuit of a people‑led culture at Blue Planet is paying off. And Di Piazza and Anderson are following the lead of their GM and evidently buying‑in to the commitment to their customers’ transformation goals as seen by the latter’s close involvement in the adoption of Open Digital Architecture to simplify operations at BT, and the former representing Blue Planet at Deutsche Telekom’s recent Campus Fair in Bonn.

While no longer a regular on the sound stage, Cumello and his band are eager to get out there and put OSS back in the spotlight.

“ We’re going on the journey, and committing to that journey. Yes, we’re selling something, but that can’t be the only part of the process we’re interested in. We’re signing up for the whole transformation, and want to find our place within that. ”

Cumello.