Be the BOS: Catalyst aims to create reference implementations for standard ODA components

A new TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept is developing a common Business Operating System (BOS) – an interoperable reference implementation of a core commerce management system, which includes a product catalog and order management service that communications service providers (CSPs) can use to reduce integration costs and spur innovation. BOS is being demonstrated at Digital Transformation World this week in Nice, France.

Aside from application program interfaces (APIs), TM Forum members traditionally have not created software code. Rather they have collaborated on defining common language, best practices and information models to make it easier to do business. BOS, however, heralds a new type of collaboration where members will co-create code. For now, this shared software will remain part of the BOS Catalyst project but eventually could be contributed to open source.

Initiated by Orange and Vodafone, who are championing the Catalyst, the BOS project is a reference implementation of a portion of the Open Digital Architecture (ODA). The ODA provides a blueprint for how operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) need to be redesigned to support digital ecosystems and take full advantage of technology such as 5G and artificial intelligence (AI). It consists of a business architecture, which describes in business terms what CSPs and their partners want to achieve, and a technical architecture that delivers a blueprint for the underlying infrastructure architecture and data. BOS sits at the center of the technical architecture as the core commerce management system. Collectively, the IT applications responsible for core commerce management were formerly part of BSS (although this traditional classification is no longer used in ODA).

Why is BOS needed?

CSPs’ current core commerce architecture consists of many different commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software applications that have been developed in-house to support order management (for example, product catalogs, quotation tools, rating modules and order orchestration systems). These often either have overlapping functionality or present gaps in the end-to-end customer journey, which operators must address through customization. As a result, operators spend millions of dollars and many months on complex integration and further customization whenever changes are needed.

“Today, the challenge for the CSP is to have IT systems that are agile enough to address innovation efficiently – it is crucial for success in the digital revolution and in facing competitive players,” says Karim Jammal, Enterprise Architect, Orange, and leader of the Catalyst. “BOS will help us focus on innovation instead of cost-savings and integration issues.”

This is particularly important as operators begin to deploy 5G and will require the ability to facilitate and participate in multi-partner digital ecosystems. By agreeing on the basic capabilities and components of a core commerce management system and the way it exchanges information with customer-facing systems and other support systems, CSPs can dramatically reduce the time it takes to create and deploy new product offers. Indeed, a plug-and-play, cloud-native core commerce engine will be necessary to manage and monetize 5G applications.

Watch Jammal discuss the Catalyst:

How does it work?

The BOS Catalyst, which in addition to Orange and Vodafone includes catalog vendors Globetom and Sigma Systems and systems integrators IBM and SigScale as participants, shows how to implement and orchestrate TM Forum Open APIs in order to build a complete experience for the customer, from ordering a product through to bill calculation. The graphic below shows a more detailed view of BOS and where it sits within the ODA.

BOS Canvas makes components plug-and-play

A major result of the Catalyst is development of the BOS software ‘Canvas’, which acts as the backbone of the core commerce system, describing which components are necessary and how to assemble them. By adopting the Canvas, which has been developed using a microservices and container-based approach, CSPs and software suppliers will be able to test compatibility of commercial solutions.

The BOS Catalyst team is quick to point out that the goal of the project is not to develop a solution to replace commercial product catalogs or order management systems, or eliminate the role of systems integrators. Rather the idea is for vendors to have more time to develop differentiated features on top of a compliant backbone, in the same way that OSS suppliers are developing commercial implementations leveraging open source code from ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform). Similarly, integrators would be freed up to focus on helping CSPs develop innovative products and services, rather than spending all their time on complex integration tasks.

“Solution providers will be able to concentrate on delivering up-to-date systems phased with the upcoming waves of technical and business transformations,” says Laurent Leboucher, Vice President, Architecture Enablers & Security, Orange Labs Services. “CSPs will be more keen on integrating these solutions knowing that they natively integrate with other components and clearly identify the added value compared with the current state-of-the-art. In that context, demonstrated compliance of implementations will bring a strong differentiation to solution providers targeting long-term relationships with CSPs.”

BOS is win-win for CSPs and suppliers

Brian Burton, Distinguished Engineer and Principal Technology Architect, Vodafone Group, agrees that BOS is win-win for CSPs and suppliers:

“This idea of bringing together different partners, service providers, products and services into a single view of a catalog and creating a seamless integration of different catalogs – for me, that’s the real strength of BOS. We've had some really good work done by the Catalyst participants to show that we can pull these things together in a way that opens us up to more closely working with one another, without endangering intellectual property.”

At Digital Transformation World this week, attendees of the BOS Catalyst demonstration will see a customer journey during which B2B and B2C customers select products through a product catalog. While it’s transparent to the customers, in the back end the CSP is using multiple catalogs – from Sigma Systems, Globetom and a ‘homegrown’ system that Orange has built.

As part of the project, the team has developed a new TM Forum Open API called the Front-end Back-end API, which facilitates standard exchange of information between the customer-facing portal (the front end) and the product catalog (the back end). In addition, they have developed an API gateway and several container ‘envelopes’ which contain application code and can exchange with an event bus that is based on Apache Kafka.

“This is a very practical result of the Catalyst,” says Hervé Bouvier, Product Owner of Order Management, Orange, “On one side we are illustrating different standards like ODA, Open APIs and the TM Forum Information Framework, but it’s also practical in the fact that you can go back home with the library and to continue to implement BOS processes and to share it with the open source community.”

What’s next?

The Catalyst marks the first steps in the development of BOS: creating the functional architecture; developing the BOS Canvas; and starting work on the software architecture (the envelope). Currently, the team is doing this within TM Forum’s Open Digital Lab, which provides a runtime environment for conformance testing and validation of ODA components, using ‘glass-box’ (shared code) and ‘black-box’ (proprietary code) components. In the future, it’s possible that BOS or portions of it could be contributed to an open source project for further development.

“I hope that what people are going to take away from the demonstration is this idea that an individual customer, whether they're a B2B customer, a B2C customer or a developer building their own solution, can use TM Forum-compliant catalogs and products and to deliver whatever service they want in a wider ecosystem of different partners,” says Vodafone’s Burton.

Learn more by watching this video filmed at Digital Transformation World 2019: