In case your time is short
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Ops 3.0 has become a product in addition to a service delivery platform. Originally built for INOC’s NOC service delivery, the platform is now available as a Platform as a Service (PaaS), giving organizations access to the same proven tools, processes, and operating model.
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The platform now supports more than NOC operations. With Xerox’s help desk expertise integrated, Ops 3.0 can handle a broader set of workloads—from traditional network and infrastructure operations to full help desk services.
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Clients have new ways to engage with the platform. In addition to traditional managed services, a Direct Client Support model allows client engineers to log directly into the platform and collaborate without needing costly ticketing systems.
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Organizations can take more direct control. New self-service features include customizable on-call notifications, scheduled maintenance management, and streamlined knowledge article reviews to keep documentation accurate and current.
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AI is already improving NOC workflows. Ops 3.0 uses GenAI to generate incident summaries and resolution notes, reducing administrative time so engineers can focus on troubleshooting. Experiments are also underway in adaptive communication, automated knowledge creation, and AI-driven email and sentiment analysis.
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Every enhancement follows responsible innovation principles. The platform is built with data sovereignty, measured deployment, and human oversight in mind, ensuring reliability and security come first.
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The result is faster resolution, lower costs, and greater flexibility. Whether clients fully outsource, run hybrid models, or self-run Ops 3.0 to operate their own NOCs, the platform continues to evolve to meet diverse operational needs.
Our Ops 3.0 platform (“Platform 3.0”) has been at the heart of INOC’s service delivery for several years, serving as our operating system for technology, operations, and service delivery.
As a core component of Xerox IT Solutions (XITS) Managed Services now, the platform continues to evolve. It supports a wide range of clients—from SMBs to medium and large enterprises, and from small to large communications service providers (CSPs).
While the core platform continues to excel at ingesting alarm feeds, auto-correlating events, and presenting unified tickets through a single pane of glass, we've been hard at work evolving and expanding its capabilities to meet the changing needs of our clients and the industry—and to harness some new powers afforded by the latest in generative AI.
Over the past 12-16 months, and particularly in the first half of this year, we've made significant enhancements to the platform across three major areas:
- Platform flexibility and deployment options
- Client self-service capabilities
- AI-powered NOC assistance
Let me quickly walk you through these developments and shed some light on where we're heading.
Platform as a Service: Extending Ops 3.0 Beyond INOC
One of the biggest recent developments in our platform has been the introduction of Ops 3.0 as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering.
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Ops 3.0 serves as the “operating system” for our NOC services delivery. It ingests alarm and telemetry feeds from diverse environments, automatically correlates and prioritizes events, and presents unified, actionable tickets through a single pane of glass.
Designed to accelerate detection, response, and resolution, the platform combines automation, flexible deployment options, and AI-powered assistance to streamline NOC workflows and reduce noise.
By enabling client self-service capabilities while also supporting fully outsourced operations, Ops 3.0 provides organizations with a scalable, modern foundation for network management that shortens time-to-value and adapts to evolving infrastructure needs. Learn more in our explainer.
While we originally built Ops 3.0 for our own use to deliver best-in-class NOC services, we've now begun offering the platform to organizations that want to run their own NOCs using our proven tools and methodologies. (Of course, we continue to use our platform internally to deliver services, too.)
This PaaS option came about organically.
We had a major global client approach us, saying, essentially, "We want to bring our NOC operations in-house for business reasons, but we love your environment and the way you do things. Can we use your platform?"
That question led us to effectively productize what we'd built for ourselves to use to deliver services.
Our PaaS offering is more than just access to tools. When organizations license the Ops 3.0 platform to “drive themselves,” they're getting:
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Integrated toolsets: All the technical capabilities, workflows, and automations we've developed and refined over 20+ years.
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Proven processes: Best-in-breed methodologies for delivering NOC services that have been battle-tested across millions of incidents.
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A complete operating model: The platform and processes are designed to work hand-in-hand. You can't effectively use one without the other—and that’s by design.
Teams that are opting for the PaaS option pay for the platform on what’s essentially a subscription basis (similar to how we partner with toolset providers like ServiceNow to use their tools in our platform). We went live with our first PaaS client toward the end of last year, and much of our work in the first six months of this year has been refining and enhancing the platform to better support this use case.
It's worth noting that refining and enhancing the platform is an ongoing process. We're continually fleshing out bits and pieces to make the platform more useful in scenarios where other organizations are using it independently. This iterative improvement approach makes sure that both our internal operations and our PaaS clients benefit from continuous enhancements.
Talk to us if you’re interested in learning more about it.
Help Desk Capabilities for Diverse Workloads
With the integration of the Xerox team and their clients, we've expanded the platform's capabilities to handle a broader range of support scenarios. While INOC has traditionally focused almost exclusively on network and infrastructure operations, Xerox brought MSP services with significant help desk components.
This presented an interesting challenge: our tooling and optimizations were 100% purpose-built for NOC operations. Help Desk workflows, expectations, and reporting requirements are different.
So, over the first six months of this year, we've done substantial work to make the platform equally effective for both traditional NOC operations and help desk services.
Direct Client Support: A New Operational Model
More recently, particularly as we've become part of Xerox and begun serving organizations with different operational needs, we've developed what we’re calling "Direct Client Support." This is fundamentally different from our “legacy” service model.
In this model, we continue to provide our standard Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, monitoring, and initial incident response. However, when an incident requires client expertise—because they know their environment best—instead of escalating through email or their ticketing system, we allow their engineers to log directly into our platform and complete the work there.
This addresses a specific need we've identified: many organizations, particularly those without mature IT operations, don’t have their own ticketing systems. Rather than force them to build that infrastructure—at a substantial cost—so we can support them as a NOC, we're letting them leverage ours while maintaining the collaborative support model that makes NOC services effective.
In several cases, this approach has enabled clients to retire their existing tools—such as ticketing systems and monitoring tools—and eliminate those associated costs.
Client Self-Service: Putting Control in Your Hands
One of our major focus areas has been expanding client self-service capabilities. We've learned that clients want more direct control over their experience, and we've built several new capabilities to deliver just that:
On-call management and notificationsWe've implemented a pretty comprehensive on-call and notification system that goes far beyond what used to be an email-only approach. Clients can now:
This might seem basic, but it solves a real problem: At 3 AM, when we need to escalate a critical issue, we're now waking up the right person who can actually fix the problem, not just whoever happens to be on the default contact list. It’s the client experience teams have been asking for—and makes for far faster resolution. |
Scheduled maintenance management
As the team providing NOC support, one of our hardest operational challenges has been dealing with clients' scheduled maintenance. When clients know about planned work—whether it's their own maintenance, carrier notifications, or facilities work like power testing—but don't give us a heads up ahead of time, our NOC sees it as an outage and starts escalating. So, we've built a new self-service portal where clients can directly:
Once clients input this information, the platform automatically suppresses monitoring during the maintenance window and performs post-maintenance checks to catch any unintended impacts. This makes sure nothing was inadvertently broken during the maintenance work. This is particularly valuable for our “Tier 0” clients who handle their own primary support but want us to provide oversight, notification, and verification. |
Knowledge article review and approvalOur NOC operates using knowledge articles as runbooks, but keeping these current has always been challenging. The typical pattern looked like this:
If a process changes on the client side, and no one proactively updates the runbook, it will obviously break when run. To get more proactive here and catch those changes, we've implemented a review system that periodically asks clients to:
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AI-Powered NOC Assistance: The Next Frontier
Like everyone in the technology space, we've been actively exploring AI capabilities.
However, given the particularly sensitive and high-stakes nature of NOC support, we’ve been deliberately measured and focused on what I call "NOC AI Assist"—that is, using AI to make our NOC more efficient and effective rather than trying to replace human expertise.
Let me run through what’s currently in production (active in the platform), what’s currently experimental, and what we’re just researching.
What's in production (live in service)Incident SummarizationWe've successfully deployed GenAI for incident summarization, and this is making a real difference in our operations. When a ticket has been active for weeks with hundreds of lines of notes and updates, our engineers no longer spend 5-10 minutes reading through everything to understand the current state. The AI creates an executive summary that captures the essential information and current action items. We're still in the trust-building phase—engineers often read the summary and then verify it against the full notes—but as accuracy improves, this is significantly reducing the time to productive action on complex incidents. Resolution Notes GenerationWe're also using GenAI to help create resolution notes at incident closure. The AI reviews the entire incident history and proposes resolution notes that our engineers can review, modify, and approve. This serves two purposes:
Let me be frank: we hire NOC engineers because they're excellent technical troubleshooters, not necessarily because they're eloquent writers. That’s simply asking too much from most experts. GenAI can help bridge that gap and provide very clearly-written and well-articulated technical summaries and instructions at machine speed—letting engineers spend more time troubleshooting. |
What’s experimentalAdaptive CommunicationWe're experimenting with using GenAI to adapt our communication style to the specific “audience” we’re working with. Our clients range from those with top-tier technical expertise to quick-service restaurant locations where the primary contact might be someone working point-of-sale. We're exploring how AI can help us "right-size" our communication—maintaining technical accuracy while ensuring accessibility. Knowledge Article GenerationAnother promising area is automatically generating knowledge articles from well-resolved incidents. When we have an incident that exemplifies good troubleshooting and resolution, we can have AI create a draft runbook that our team can refine and approve. It's about optimizing the time spent on documentation, not starting from scratch. |
What we’re researchingAgentic AI for Email ProcessingWe're researching using the latest in agentic AI for processing inbound emails, particularly carrier maintenance notifications. Today, a staff member reads these emails, creates change tickets, extracts relevant information, and links affected circuits. This is exactly the kind of task that agentic AI should excel at—though we're being very careful about implementation to ensure accuracy and security. Sentiment AnalysisWe're also exploring using AI for tone analysis of client communications. If we receive multiple emails from the same client in a short period and detect urgency, we could automatically prioritize those tickets for immediate attention. It's about being more responsive to client needs, even when they're not explicitly stated. |
The Foundation Remains Strong
While I've focused on what's new and changing, it's important to note that these enhancements build upon the robust foundation of Ops 3.0.
The platform continues to excel at its core functions:
- Automated alarm correlation using machine learning to reduce time from alarm to ticket.
- Incident automation that enriches tickets with CMDB data and relevant knowledge articles.
- Discrete, secure multi-tenant architecture that keeps client data strictly isolated.
- Seamless integration with existing NMS, ITSM, and communication tools.
- A comprehensive data platform providing actionable insights through our client portal.
Read our Ops 3.0 explainer for a deep dive on these and other capabilities.
A Word About Responsible Innovation
As we continue to evolve Ops 3.0, we're guided by a philosophy of responsible innovation. This is particularly important given the sensitive nature of our work and the trust our clients place in us.
- The first component of this is data sovereignty. The partnerships we’ve made for GenAI capabilities were chosen specifically because they maintain strict client data separation within their infrastructure, and our data (processed by the large language models) never leaves the data centers.
- Another guiding principle here is measured deployment. We thoroughly test new capabilities before deploying them in production.
- Human oversight is also a factor. We're enhancing human capabilities with AI, not replacing human judgment.
- Lastly, every enhancement we devote time and attention to must deliver real value to our clients.
What This Means for Our Clients
These platform enhancements translate into tangible benefits across every aspect of your NOC operations.
You now have greater flexibility in how you consume and interact with NOC services, whether through our traditional managed model, our new PaaS offering, or the hybrid Direct Client Support approach.
The expanded self-service capabilities put more control directly in your hands, allowing you to manage on-call schedules, maintenance windows, and documentation updates without waiting for meetings or email exchanges.
AI-assisted troubleshooting and communication are driving faster incident resolution, while ensuring that your documentation stays current with your operational reality through our review and approval workflows.
Perhaps most importantly, as we automate routine tasks like incident summarization and initial email processing, our engineers can focus their expertise on complex problem-solving rather than administrative overhead, delivering improved efficiency across your entire support operation.
The Evolution Continues
The Ops 3.0 platform represents more than two decades of NOC operational experience crystallized into technology and process. These recent enhancements demonstrate our commitment to continuous improvement and innovation.
We're not trying to revolutionize NOC operations overnight with unproven technology. Instead, we're thoughtfully applying new capabilities where they can make a meaningful difference, always with an eye toward reliability, security, and client value.
As we continue pushing NOC operations forward, we remain focused on our core mission: delivering exceptional NOC services that keep your infrastructure running smoothly. Whether you're using our full managed services, licensing our platform for your own support operation, or somewhere in between, Ops 3.0 continues to evolve to meet your needs.
Learn more about our Ops 3.0 Platform and contact us to schedule a discovery session to learn more about all the efficiencies we bring to support workflows.
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