Article | Beyond Connectivity, Networks, Order Management, Ecosystem management, Autonomous operations, Platform business, Customer experience management, Business Process Framework (eTOM), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Open APIs, Operations Support Systems (OSS), Service assurance, Privacy & trust, Internet of Things (IoT), Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Cloud Migration, Service orchestration, Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

Case studies and Catalysts: A year of accomplishments

23 Dec 2016

Yesterday Annie Turner posted a fun look back at some of the hottest trends we’ve seen in telecom this year from platforms to APIs, digital maturity models and monetizing the Internet of Everything (IoE). But there’s nothing quite like practical examples to illustrate progress, so here’s a look at some of the great work our members have accomplished this year.

Our Case Study Handbook, published last month, is chock-full of examples of companies using TM Forum assets including Frameworx and Open APIs to transform their companies. One of the most dramatic is that of Telefónica, which is using Frameworx in a massive effort aimed at digitalizing its operating businesses in 15 countries. So far the company has been able to eliminate 33 percent of all IT applications, 20 data centers and more than 6,200 physical servers across the operating companies.

KPN also has undergone radical digital transformation that has helped the company increase its Net Promoter Score by more than a dozen points for consumer residential and mobile services, which is no easy feat. The company also has realized a savings of €350 million ($386 million) on run-rate CapEx and OpEx, a 60 percent reduction in customer and other supporting processes, and a 70 percent reduction in product portfolio. Not bad for two and half years’ work.

Platform revolution

As Annie noted in her piece, several of our members like BT, Orange and Vodafone are actively embracing and talking up platform business models. Another great example of a service provider who gets it is O2, Telefónica’s UK operating company. The company used our Open Digital Ecosystem to get into the insurance business – O2 Drive is a new service provided in conjunction with insurance brokers in the UK which offers customers rewards for safe driving. The O2 Drive platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services, which allowed O2 to get it up and running in just six months.

As Stephen Devereux, Head of Digital Products, Innovation & Insight, Telefónica UK, notes, “We’re the first platform in O2 to build with an elastic model. We know we can scale very quickly, practically on demand. As a result we are now looking to move many of our other services to AWS, which for a telco is a major shift.”

Indeed, this is a major shift and a necessary one. Network operators must start thinking outside the box, and that includes partnering with ‘adversaries’ like AWS, if they hope to remain competitive in the digital world.

Catalysts prove the concept

Our Catalyst program has also produced lots of great examples of collaboration among companies that often compete with each other. During the past couple years, our members have participated in more than 40 projects addressing a wide variety of challenges ranging from complex technical problems to business issues.

One group of Catalysts is particularly exciting because in addition to bringing together our members, they also are providing an opportunity for us to work with other standards-development organizations (SDOs) and open source groups.

The Enabling the digital services marketplace with automated onboarding, which won the Best in Show award at TM Forum Innovation InFocus in Dallas and Biggest Contribution to TM Forum Assets at TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore, has widespread support from service providers, with AT&T, China Mobile, Orange and Verizon all championing, and BT and Vodafone joining the next phase for TM Forum Live! 2017 in Nice in May. Amdocs, Bristol is Open, Cloud Best Practices, EnterpriseWeb, Huawei, IBM and Oracle are participants, and the team is working closely with other standards bodies, including ETSI, Open Platform for NFV and TOSCA. The project is a merger of several award-winning projects and is aimed at automating the entire lifecycle of a virtual function from procurement and onboarding to testing and validation, deployment, configuration and assurance.

One of last year’s award winning Catalysts called Zero-Touch NaaS Leveraging LSO, SDN and NFV (NaaS 4.0) is a joint TM Forum and MEF project that is working on orchestration of network-as-a service end to end across partners’ boundaries. PCCW’s Shahar Steiff used a great analogy of getting Lego bricks and Meccano parts to play nicely together in explaining the goals of the Catalyst at TM Forum Action Week in Vancouver this summer.

Telefónica has been championing a Catalyst called NFV service orchestration and lifecycle management based on open Source MANO, which will continue at TM Forum Live! 2017. The project is aimed at evolving OpenMANO within ETSI’s Open Source MANO framework.

We presented dozens more projects this year, several of which won awards at our live events. Here are some highlights of winning projects:

Artificial intelligence

Cognitive Digital Agent, which won Best in Show at TM Forum Live! Asia earlier this month, was championed by Globe Telecom and supported by participants Amdocs, Huawei and Infosys. It showed how to create the next generation of customer care services through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

Another AI Catalyst called Smart industrial manufacturing: Robots as a service, which was championed by TWI, won Best New Catalyst at TM Forum Live! 2016 in Nice in May. It demonstrated online orders for robot-based services, along with remote activation and configuration of robot cells using TM Forum Open APIs.

Innovation

The Most Innovative Catalyst – Commercial in Smart X at TM Forum Live! 2016 went to Smart city: Service level management for smart city ecosystems and trusted IoT, which continued the work of a previous project showcasing the live smart city use case of Milton Keynes in the UK. That project demonstrated how BT’s Data Hub approach enables a smart city ecosystem to collect, trade and monetize data and data-intensive services. The latest phase of the project added the ability to provide service level management and trusted IoT.

Most Innovative Catalyst – Commercial Applications in Communications Industry at TM Forum Live! 2016 went to one sponsored by Orange called New business models with mobile sponsored data. This project demonstrated a new way to monetize mobile data in a business-to-business-to-consumer model and create a trustworthy experience between digital service providers, such as banks, and their customers.

Operations Center of the Future

Finally, the big winner this year for the Greatest Contribution to the Evolution of TM Forum Assets (it won at both TM Forum Live! 2016 and Innovation InFocus 2016) is helping to define the digital Operations Center of the Future. The Building model-driven service orchestration via an FMO architecture project is working to define network functions virtualization (NFV) orchestrator behavior through model-driven and micro-service chaining approaches. It has been focusing on a model-driven practice and development of necessary metadata to define the behavior of the NFV orchestrator, and is exploring a micro-service chaining approach with a Future Mode of Operation (FMO) architecture.

Throughout the upcoming year we will be posting many new case studies and articles about the next round of Catalyst projects that are just getting underway now. Some of the projects are continuations of the projects covered here and others are brand new. One thing is certain: They will all push the envelope on collaboration and innovation.