The Decoupling and Integrationblock manages the separation of the rest of the functional blocks so that the boundaries between the sets of related functions represented bythe functional blocks are respected. This functional block ensures that the integration can be implemented in a flexible way without any predefined combination patterns. The functionalities offered by the Decoupling and Integration fabric include the management of an API catalogue and related documentation, as well as the ability to perform message routing and API mediation,thus enhancing the separated components’ APIs with policies, security and control.

The Party Management functional block manages the internal and external actors of interest, such as persons or organisations (referred to as Parties). It focuses on management of the information related to the parties, the party roles and rights, and all related marketing, sales and billing activities.

The Core Commerce Management functional block is responsible for all activities related to the provisioning of main business processes. It manages the catalogue of Product Offers and Products and handles the lifecycle of Product Orders, starting from an order creation and following all of the orchestration actions necessary to fulfil the complete order, including any assurance activities. This functional block is decoupled from the technical concerns of product delivery. This block may also include Product Inventory Management, Problem Handling, Service-Level Agreement (SLA) Management, and other related functions such as Product Testing or Agreement Management.

The Intelligence Management functional block focuses on the processes related to big data analytics using the operational data produced by the other functional blocks. This functional block employs techniques for data analysis, such as trend analysis, correlation and data aggregation needed for network performance evaluation, but also for marketing and sales forecasting. The insight management capability enables this block to uncover new patterns and relations based on historical data, using popular approaches based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Another functionality of this block is described as Autonomic Manager, which focuses on the implementation of closed control loops that can configure and then adapt in real time the state of a resource or a network using cognitive algorithms. This functional block deals with the knowledge management (including the production knowledge plane) activities on different time scales (fast and slow) to implement self-anything (organisation, healing, tuning, etc.) capabilities. Referring back to the set of design principles, it is evident that the Intelligence Management block includes the implementation of the intent-based networking capabilities and thus should also include the specification of high-level policies and objectives.

The Production functional block is in charge of service management. Specifically, the products offered in Core Commerce Management are built using the Customer-Facing Services (CFSs), which are exposed by the Production functional block. The CFSs, on the other hand, are built within Production using Resource-Facing Services (RFSs) and Resource Functions (RFs). Using the exposed APIs of this functional block, the Core Commerce Management block can ask for the fulfilment of services that compose a given ordered product, or the Engagement Management block can forward a user request for changing an existing service. The main functionalities of the Production block include all activities related to the end-to-end service and resource lifecycle management, including – in the case of multi-domain service partnering – actions that may span across multiple organisations that are part of the ecosystem. The Production block is also responsible for the service development, infrastructure deployment, operations management, usage and performance management, workforce management, resource provisioning, service and resources catalogues and inventories, etc. The Production functional block enables a flexible solution that can respond with the desired agility, based on the principle of decoupling the process of how services are implemented from the way the production services are offered to the users. This automatically focuses the Core Commerce Management block on a different approach to building products, which is by reviewing what underlying services are offered from the Production block and how they can be combined together to achieve the desired product. At the same time, the differentiation between CFS and RFS enables transparent switching from one technology to another without any changes required above the RFS level or in the exposed services outside the Production block.
Related to the Production functional block is the Operational Domain Management, which defines the scope of operations within an administrative boundary (the organisation itself or an external partner) or a technology boundary (services and resources exposed in that domain). The operational domain manages the complete lifecycle of all services and resources that fall into that domain, including service creation, provisioning, termination, assurance, usage and related processes. A composite operational domain is defined as an operational domain that creates services based on services offered from other operational domains. In this way, a production service can be defined as a combination of multiple exposed services from multiple operational/technical domains. In addition, the same exposed APIs can be used for a broad range of services (related to connectivity, such as circuits, or endpoint-oriented, such as VMs or applications). This, of course, requires a suitable information model that will enable the high-level abstraction needed to describe all types of services in a common, technology-agnostic way.