Mid-market service providers are faced with numerous operations challenges every day. Network rollout, new services and ever-tightening budgets are driving operators to find new solutions, particularly in the area of automation. But service automation and IT automation can be very different matters. Tools that work for data center rollouts may not work for deploying and managing new customer services. Operations managers, network planners and solution architects are asking: what tools are best for service automation, can we automate without a costly consulting project, how would automation affect my operation, could we support it, how can we get beyond CLI-based operations, and what are other mid-market service providers doing?