Accelerating the standardization of telco software components
TM Forum members, including Vodafone Group, have demonstrated a new test kit for validating compliance of software applications with Open Digital Architecture (ODA) component specifications, paving the way towards a market for standardized and interoperable software components.
18 Jun 2021
Accelerating the standardization of telco software components
TM Forum members, including Vodafone Group, have demonstrated a new test kit for validating compliance of software applications with Open Digital Architecture (ODA) component specifications, paving the way to a market for standardized and interoperable software components.
Interoperable software components are becoming an increasingly important part of communications service providers’ (CSPs’) arsenal as they advance their digital transformation. Reusable and modular components are discrete software elements that encapsulate functions which CSPs can use as building blocks to quickly create differentiated products and services.
Access to a wide range of interoperable software components from multiple vendors will help operators speed up service introduction while also greatly reducing their procurement and integration costs. For this reason, TM Forum is playing a leading role in helping to develop a market for standardized and interoperable software components. The component test kit is being developed as part of the ODA Component Accelerator project. TM Forum’s standardized Open APIs, which ensure the interoperability of software applications, are an integral part of ODA Components.
In December 2020, a group of TM Forum members including Accenture, Axiata Digital Labs, Global Wavenet, Globetom, Oracle Communications, Orange, SigScale, Sysbiz Technologies, Vodafone and Whale Cloud launched the accelerator project to create an ODA reference implementation that companies can use to test the compliance of commercial software components with the ODA specifications. The Open Digital Architecture specifications are being developed separately in several projects that are underway in the TM Forum collaboration community.
“In addition to testing compliance with the ODA standards, the reference implementation is helping to accelerate the development of those standards by mapping the ODA component specifications against real-world commercial products, thereby validating the standards as they are being created,” says Andy Tiller, TM Forum’s Executive Vice President, Member Innovation.
Members of the ODA Component Accelerator project recently shared their progress, which includes:
The work draws on TM Forum members’ successful development of Open APIs, which are the interfaces that handle how components respond to requests.
“The objective is to build on the work already done in the Open API initiative where every TM Forum Open API has a compliance test kit that is used to validate that an implementation of the API is conformant with the design guidelines of the API standard,” said Lester Thomas, Chief IT Systems Architect at Vodafone Group.
Standardized components are an important step towards the goal of making the ODA 100% machine readable, as CSPs seek to build agile and autonomous cloud native IT and network systems.
“You get much closer to zero touch, plug and play when you can actually take a product from a vendor that is specified to a particular component and you know what environment it is going to run in, how it is going to be operated and what it is going to do,” says Ian Turkington, the Forum’s VP, Architecture and APIs.
Watch Lester Thomas of Vodafone Group demonstrate how to use the new component CTK:
Contact Ian Turkington for more details.
Interoperable software components are becoming an increasingly important part of communications service providers’ (CSPs’) arsenal as they advance their digital transformation. Reusable and modular components are discrete software elements that encapsulate functions which CSPs can use as building blocks to quickly create differentiated products and services.
Access to a wide range of interoperable software components from multiple vendors will help operators speed up service introduction while also greatly reducing their procurement and integration costs. For this reason, TM Forum is playing a leading role in helping to develop a market for standardized and interoperable software components. The component test kit is being developed as part of the ODA Component Accelerator project. TM Forum’s standardized Open APIs, which ensure the interoperability of software applications, are an integral part of ODA Components.
Testing commercial software components
In December 2020, a group of TM Forum members including Accenture, Axiata Digital Labs, Global Wavenet, Globetom, Oracle Communications, Orange, SigScale, Sysbiz Technologies, Vodafone and Whale Cloud launched the accelerator project to create an ODA reference implementation that companies can use to test the compliance of commercial software components with the ODA specifications. The Open Digital Architecture specifications are being developed separately in several projects that are underway in the TM Forum collaboration community.
“In addition to testing compliance with the ODA standards, the reference implementation is helping to accelerate the development of those standards by mapping the ODA component specifications against real-world commercial products, thereby validating the standards as they are being created,” says Andy Tiller, TM Forum’s Executive Vice President, Member Innovation.
Members of the ODA Component Accelerator project recently shared their progress, which includes:
- Delivering a conformance test kit (CTK) that validates security and functional aspects of ODA components. The CTK will test any component against the relevant ODA component specification and associated API specifications. As a first reference example, members tested the CTK on several different product catalogs, including one from Vodafone and commercial products from Oracle and Whale Cloud.
- Establishing a three-stage test platform in TM Forum’s Open Digital Lab
- Building an execution environment for ODA reference implementations based on standard Kubernetes infrastructure, which includes the release automation part of a continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline
Open APIs provide the foundation
The work draws on TM Forum members’ successful development of Open APIs, which are the interfaces that handle how components respond to requests.
“The objective is to build on the work already done in the Open API initiative where every TM Forum Open API has a compliance test kit that is used to validate that an implementation of the API is conformant with the design guidelines of the API standard,” said Lester Thomas, Chief IT Systems Architect at Vodafone Group.
Standardized components are an important step towards the goal of making the ODA 100% machine readable, as CSPs seek to build agile and autonomous cloud native IT and network systems.
“You get much closer to zero touch, plug and play when you can actually take a product from a vendor that is specified to a particular component and you know what environment it is going to run in, how it is going to be operated and what it is going to do,” says Ian Turkington, the Forum’s VP, Architecture and APIs.
Watch Lester Thomas of Vodafone Group demonstrate how to use the new component CTK:
Contact Ian Turkington for more details.
