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2016 – how was it for you?

23 Dec 2016
2016 – how was it for you?

2016 – how was it for you?

So, as the calendar year draws to a close for many of us, are you glad it’s almost over, or did good things happen? For most of us it’s a mixture of both. Here’s a light-hearted look at some the year’s landmark shifts in telecoms. We ended 2015, talking about the future OSS – or more accurately how OSS and BSS are key to the future of network operators. These were two of the most popular blogs of the year, right at the end of it, a kind of blog Black Friday, if you like: We’ve avoided OSS long enough by Nancee Ruzicka, with more than 30 years as an OSS engineer and a process architect, and The future of OSS – we can learn from shooting elephants by me, with more than 30 years of writing about such things. No, we’re not twins. Naturally we come at it a bit differently, but the message is that OSS, and its not-quite twin BSS, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future – now let’s figure out how we can evolve, leverage and monetize them like never before. That kicked off a whole load of stuff in 2016 – and it’s all interconnected – appropriately enough. Some smart telcos realized that the digital transformation they are going through to cut costs, digitize everything they can, provide better service and more services, be more agile, etc. could be the mother of all game-changers. Massively simplifying and consolidating processes and systems – and making them interoperable, fast, through open APIs – also enable them to make their assets and capabilities available to the outside world to create new services.

When is a telco not a telco? When it’s platform-based business.

Watch George Glass, BT’s Chief Architect; Dr. Lester Thomas, Chief Systems Architect, Vodafone Group; and Laurent Leboucher, Vice President of APIs and Digital Ecosystems, Orange, talk about how their businesses are making this major shift to become platform players. They are introduced by TM Forum’s very own Barry Graham, who explains how our platform strategy is going to help many more of our members with theirs, and execution. The Forum’s platform strategy was announced at a fabulous, record-setting TM Forum Action Week in Vancouver in July, but it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise to anyone paying attention – rather, it was the next logical step. At our flagship event, TM Forum Live! at Nice in June, nine of the world’s biggest network operators signed up to the Open API Manifesto. Axiata, Bharti Airtel, BT, China Mobile, China Unicom, NTT-Group, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone officially adopted TM Forum’s suite of Open APIs for digital service management: as a foundational component of their IT architectures; to promote global adoption of the API suite by their partners; and to expect technology vendors and systems integrators to support these APIs in their products and cloud-based services. This was followed by eight of the world’s leading vendors (DGIT, EnterpriseWeb, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, BearingPoint/Infonova, Oracle, and UXP Systems) pledging to support the Open API Manifesto in October, and two more (Amdocs and Etiya) have joined since. If you don’t get what the fuss is about, read this short free ebook so you can impress the boss in the New Year. Alternatively, you can always look for a new job. The title reflects just how important this stuff is – Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality. K? Keep repeating to yourself, speed and scale, speed and scale…

How to join the platform revolution

While Open APIs are an important piece of the puzzle, there’s a ton of back-end work that’s also needed to turn operators’ infrastructure inside out so that it is capable of supporting platform business models. This includes coming to grips with end-to-end management and orchestration (affectionately known as MANO in ETSI-speak) – in essence the new Holy Grail for OSS/BSS. We published a well-received Insights Research report on orchestration in September explaining how we view MANO and what’s needed to make all the Lego bricks and Meccano parts play nicely together. The report is free for all TM Forum members to download, by registering on our website. But don't worry: If you’re not a member you can still get a sneak peak at the goodies! Then sign up for membership! This work is part of a much broader effort by our ZOOM team (short for Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management) and other collaboration communities to develop a new Digital Platform Reference Architecture, which will support the roll out of 5G.

Monetizing the Internet of Everything

One of the great things about platform businesses is they let others offer services using their assets and capabilities (think Amazon or Airbnb), but they enable network operators themselves to use new business model to gain new revenue streams. A good example is Vodafone looking to move into “the lucrative business of managing drone traffic, after meeting European aviation safety authorities about adapting its network to track and identify unmanned aircraft,” according to a Financial Times article (subscription needed). Now maybe we won’t have to duck, in Europe at least… But the issue of monetizing Internet of Everything (IoE – we prefer this to Internet of Things as it includes processes and people) generally is a vexed issue, and everyone’s looking for clues. September saw the first fruits of our ongoing work in this area in the shape of a free ebook, Navigating the IoE the roadmap of challenges, which was super pop. Oh yes. We followed it up with more original research from our service provider members to find out what they were doing about IoE and how, and their plans. Mighty interesting, written and researched for us by independent consultant Phil Bull. Members can download the resultant Insights Research report, The roadmap of options: Monetizing and managing IoE services, by registering on our website, but again, you can get a sneak peek even if you're not a member.

Keeping up with the Joneses

In the last quarter of the year, we started a series of workshops to develop a Digital Maturity Model and Metrics (DMMM – check out the video). We’re progressing fast – next workshop’s in London, in the New Year. Email Ken Dilbeck if you wanna get involved. This is the sketch – how do you know if you’re ahead or behind with this transformation stuff – and there are a lot of aspects too. Well it helps if you know what you should be looking at and benchmarking, and comparing your progress with comparable others. This will help you figure out what you’re doing right, what’s not going so well and where to invest to get maximum bang for your buck – haven’t heard that one in a while, I bet. You can download the initial white paper here – there’s more to come soon. It’s fitting that the last DMMM workshop took place at TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore in early December. This reflects the Forum’s increased commitment to the diverse markets of Asia, so justly famous for their innovation. So that’s a look at some of the most important telecom trends from our perspective. What do you think? Are we addressing the things most important to your business? And what do you think we’ll be writing about a year from now when we take a look back at 2017?