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DTW (Digital Transformation World)
Breaking data out of silos is essential for communication service providers (CSPs) – not only to improve their internal operations but also to enable them to create new value by acting as a platform for external innovation. A TM Forum Catalyst is demonstrating how to make this a reality.
Catalyst gives telcos a PaaS to unlock new value from big data
Breaking data out of silos is essential for communication service providers (CSPs) – not only to improve their internal operations but also to enable them to create new value by acting as a platform for external innovation. A TM Forum Catalyst is demonstrating how to make this a reality. CSPs are sitting on vast amounts of valuable data residing in operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) and management systems. This data can be used to gain actionable insights to increase efficiency and improve services as well as launch new products and even create new business models. Gartner notes that database platform as a service (dbPaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the PaaS market and forecasts dbPaaS revenues to reach almost $10 billion by 2021. To date, building a data-driven application typically has meant constructing a platform to collect data from siloed applications which takes a lot of time, staff and hardware resources. A TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept entitled Phoenix Tree: Centralized Big Data PaaS Platform, is looking to tackle this issue through a centralized big data platform that aggregates data from all domains across the network. Furthermore, by offering PaaS, CSPs can realize new value by allowing external companies to innovate with their data. Organizations want to be able to rapidly build and deploy data-driven applications and PaaS provides them with an agile development environment and the necessary hardware infrastructure and software tools to do so.
Catalyst champions bring a business challenge and work alongside participants to rapidly develop a solution. For this Catalyst, China Mobile is the champion. China Mobile generates huge amounts of data every day with more than 920 million mobile and over 163 million broadband customers. Like all CSPs, the organization is under pressure to realize the value of the data it holds. One of the biggest challenges is not only the sheer amount of data but the fact it is spread across 31 provinces and other regions in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Each province typically has its own big data platform but this doesn’t give China Mobile the whole picture of its business. The Catalyst team has developed a unified and centralized platform to act as a “corporate brain” and bring China Mobile’s “big data – big value” strategy to life. The participants in the Catalyst are AsiaInfo, Huawei, Beijing Orient National Communication Science and Technology Company (BONC) and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT).
The team is using an open and extensible architecture which is able to aggregate data from all domains across a network. They are now onboarding users to the platform, which they’ve dubbed Phoenix Tree. It is named after the plane tree, often planted in China because it is believed to attract the phoenix bird, which represents balance and harmony.
Dr. Zhu Jun, AsiaInfo, says Phoenix Tree is a fitting name for the project because “it is a home for the phoenix to live and grow in, and it will also host hundreds of tenants creating their applications and online businesses, based on data and a co-operative working environment.”
He explains that the platform has the dual purpose of improving digital operations, management capabilities and service efficiency internally for CSPs while also enabling enterprise partners across a range of markets such as finance, public security, mobility and more, to build their own data-driven applications. “For instance, a partner from the financial sector might want to better understand their customer, such as where they are located and how they move around a city, and they can leverage China Mobile’s data to do this using the platform,” he says. As the champion of this project, China Mobile provides the hardware resources, network and central processing unit as well as the overall challenge specifications, while AsiaInfo, Huawei, BUPT and BONC are providing the service resource and are building the common data model which organizes and standardizes the data, as well as the application toolkits for users.
The partners are using an open source framework which enables different vendors to construct the platform together and manage distributed resources effectively. The team is also using TM Forum’s Open APIs to provide a standard framework for integrating data.
“This makes it different from Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure PaaS offerings which are built on their own proprietary technology,” Dr. Zhu Jun explains. “The open source framework and APIs means the different partners can follow the same standard for more rapid development.”
Using what they learn from developing the platform architecture, the team will contribute back to TM Forum’s Open API program as well as demonstrate how the APIs can be used in practice.
Visitors to Digital Transformation World in Nice in May will be able to see the platform, which is designed to manage 25,000 servers, store 100 petabytes of data and support over 100 tenants, in action. They will see how internal users (including five provinces) and more than 20 external users are leveraging China Mobile data to improve operations and develop new applications. The Catalyst team is keen to attract interest from non-telecoms sectors and industries as well as other operators.
“People will be able to see how we built a large scalable platform on an open architecture,” says Dr. Zhu Jun. “It will reduce hardware investment costs, as well as accelerate digital transformation by providing an efficient, agile, data-driven application environment on top of a data-ready, resource-ready and toolkit-ready platform.”
Learn more by watching this video filmed at Digital Transformation World 2019:
