SoftBank Corp.

Executive Summary

Customer Name: SoftBank Corp.

Industry: Service Provider

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Revenue: ¥5.9 trillion (FY2023)

Customer Profile: SoftBank Corp. is one of Japan’s largest telecommunications providers, delivering mobile, broadband, enterprise, and managed network services across Japan and international markets. Its operational teams manage large-scale multi-vendor customer environments supporting enterprise and carrier infrastructure.

Background

For more than a decade, SoftBank managed network configuration management (NCM) for its Managed CPE-S and bundled carrier services through highly manual operational processes. Network engineers regularly traveled to customer locations for configuration changes and maintenance activities, creating operational overhead, inconsistent workflows, and rising support costs.

As SoftBank’s managed services business continued to grow, the company required a scalable way to manage large multi-vendor customer environments while maintaining clear operational accountability between SoftBank and its support partners.

Challenge 1: Scaling operational support across hundreds of customers

By 2011, SoftBank and its support vendors were manually managing network configuration changes for more than 250 customer environments. Customer-requested changes could take up to 10 days to complete, while engineering teams were performing hundreds of onsite visits every year simply to maintain routine network operations.

The company needed a platform capable of securely managing large-scale customer infrastructure remotely while reducing operational delays and engineering overhead.

Challenge 2: Multi-vendor infrastructure management

SoftBank evaluated several alternatives, including vendor-specific network management platforms, but required broader multi-vendor support across highly diverse customer environments. The company needed a solution capable of supporting mixed infrastructure deployments while providing centralized operational visibility and secure access controls.

Challenge 3: Operational accountability and partner access control

SoftBank also needed clearer operational boundaries between internal teams and external support vendors. Managing access permissions, tracking configuration changes, and maintaining operational accountability across multiple organizations had become increasingly difficult using manual workflows.

The Solution

SoftBank selected LogicVein Net LineDancer (netLD) and deployed the platform within a private cloud environment to manage and maintain its managed carrier service infrastructure.

netLD provided centralized configuration management, secure remote access, granular role-based permissions, configuration backup automation, and detailed operational logging across large multi-vendor customer environments.

The platform also enabled SoftBank to securely extend controlled access to subcontractors and partner vendors while maintaining full operational oversight. Kazuhiko Maruko, Network Engineer at SoftBank, explains:

“We primarily bought netLD for configuration changes, but now it is crucial for accessing our customer networks. It would be impossible for us to do our job now without netLD.”