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TM Forum’s Executive Vice President, Member Products & Services, Andy Tiller, discusses how TM Forum's Composable IT & Ecosystems mission empowers telecoms to transform, monetize, and scale through composable IT, Open APIs, and ecosystem partnerships.
Andy Tiller, TM Forum
Composable IT & Ecosystems mission: Unlocking the future of telecoms
The telecom industry faces a critical challenge: transforming legacy systems and processes to achieve the agility required for a hyper-connected, AI-driven world. TM Forum’s Composable IT & Ecosystems (CIT&E) Mission tackles this head-on by reimagining how communications service providers (CSPs) design, build, operate and monetize digital services.
TM Forum’s CIT&E Mission isn’t just about technology; it’s about a cultural shift the industry needs to take.
IT professionals and business strategists need innovative solutions to business challenges that are built on simple, modern software architectures and AI-based automation. To do that the CIT&E mission focuses on delivering real solutions in three key areas:
- Transformation: Transforming business agility & velocity by moving from legacy IT to plug-and-play software architectures
- Monetization: Enabling network monetization via Open APIs and participation in the API economy
- Partnering: Composable businesses need to engage with ecosystems and deliver value with B2B2X business models.
For telecoms, the choice is clear: embrace composability or risk becoming a commoditized provider of “dumb pipe” connectivity. The future belongs to those who build, partner, and innovate on open foundations.
However, to implement these solutions CSPs need a robust, industry-agreed, standardized foundation. ODA for the last few years has provided that foundation, and with the AI-native era upon us, ODA is continually evolving to enable AI-driven automation:
Let’s explore how.
TM Forum has identified three solution areas where the CIT&E mission can provide comprehensive guidance and practical resources that help telecom businesses solve complex challenges and spark innovation.
Transformation to a plug and play ecosystem addresses several persistent challenges within the telecom sector, particularly those related to legacy technical debt, operational complexity, cost of deployment and the risks of large-scale IT transformation.
This solution area is providing plug-and-play architecture blueprints, standards, use cases, tools and code required to enable organizations to break free from these constraints.
CSPs adopting ODA are already seeing these benefits in practice. Examples from TM Forum’s 2025 Excellence Awards include:
- China Mobile, partnering with Huawei, used ODA component-based architecture to build a unified online portal for IoT Mall (Ecosystem + Marketplace), boosting service efficiency by 80%.
- Telstra adopted ODA to transform customer experiences and improve business outcomes. This has enabled rapid delivery of leading customer solutions such as Telstra’s 5G network slicing product experience.
- Swisscom, partnering with Netcracker using ODA, accelerated deployment of new modernized autonomous operational domains (ODMs) from years to months.
- Jio Platforms Ltd strategically implemented 52 Open APIs transforming operations, streamlining processes and enhancing customer experience, achieving 30% reduction in operational expenses, 15% reduction in implementation costs, and reducing NOC workload by 65%.
Read more about these and other Excellence award finalists.
TM Forum is enabling CSPs to participate in the API economy by exposing their network capabilities to developers and partners through standardized, interoperable Open APIs. Working closely with partner organizations like GSMA, CAMARA and MEF, we are helping CSPs develop new business models and revenue streams. To support GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative, TM Forum members are collaborating to build the Operate APIs which enable CAMARA’s Service APIs to be monetized through aggregators and marketplaces. This standardization allows CSPs to efficiently offer their network services through global marketplaces, making it simple for developers and enterprises to access and pay for advanced connectivity features across multiple networks.
More than 60 CSPs now expose Open Gateway network APIs, ranging from simple number verification and SIM swap detection (to combat fraud) to more advanced quality-on-demand (for remote control of drones and other applications requiring special network characteristics). Connecting to marketplaces like Aduna and its channel partners provides global scale for CSPs. Developers pay for access to APIs, with TM Forum’s Operate APIs handling on-boarding, usage tracking, billing and other back-office tasks.
B2B2X partnerships enabled by Open APIs are transforming how telecom operators and their partners collaborate, innovate, and deliver services at scale. By adopting TM Forum’s standardized Open APIs the industry is moving away from fragmented, proprietary integrations toward a unified, standardized approach that simplifies onboarding and streamlines operations for wholesale and enterprise connectivity services.
An Open API ecosystem can make complex partnerships simple:
TM Forum ensures that organizations have access to proven frameworks, best practices, training, and collaborative tools that make transformation, monetization, and partnership initiatives achievable. But as technology becomes more complex and intelligent so the ODA foundation needs to evolve, to do this the CIT&E mission will focus on:
ODA, TM Forum’s blueprint for designing, building and operating a cloud native digital telco, is evolving to become AI-native. This means embedding intelligence into every layer, from network operations to customer experience. This design framework will ensure AI capabilities are embedded into ODA’s business and data architecture, Open APIs and components - designed in, not bolted on.
Also, by collaborating with our hyperscaler members (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft) and software provider members we are ensuring that TM Forum’s ODA Components integrate seamlessly with cloud platforms and AI tools.
Business agility requires composable IT systems and processes with seamless interoperability, which can only be achieved by adhering to industry standards. Proving conformance to those standards will be the key to ensuring agile delivery of services for growth:
- TM Forum Open API conformance: over 100 companies have certified more than 1,700 APIs in commercial software products and real-world implementations as conformant to the TM Forum Open API standards. A joint certification program with GSMA will soon allow CSPs to certify all their Open Gateway APIs together, including CAMARA’s Service APIs and TM Forum’s Operate APIs.
ODA Component conformance certification: Formal ODA Component conformance certification is now generally available as a service from TM Forum since June 2025. 5 software vendors have so far certified 15 ODA Components.
Telecoms can’t thrive in isolation which is why the CIT&E mission looks at how to bridge the gap between CSPs and potential ecosystem partners. Open APIs are necessary, but by no means sufficient on their own; partnership management needs to be improved and automated in order for B2B2X business models to achieve growth and profitability. CSPs have an opportunity to become ecosystem orchestrators, not just connectivity providers. TM Forum’s work to support this includes:
- Wholesale broadband standards to simplify partnerships between broadband access providers and retailers.
- B2B2X: as marketplaces and platform business models gain momentum, TM Forum is helping CSPs unlock new revenue streams and accelerate the adoption of open, composable business based on an ecosystem reference architecture.
TM Forum is driving widespread and practical uptake of the ODA across the telecom industry. Our focus is on making ODA accessible and valuable to a broader range of organizations, from large tier 1 operators with deep in-house technical expertise to smaller CSPs that depend more heavily on their software suppliers and system integration partners. Our initiatives include:
- Training and Professional Certification: with more than 30,000 professionals qualified via online self-paced and expert-led training.
- Success Programs: TM Forum recognizes leading CSPs that have achieved success with ODA through our Running on ODA accreditation scheme, and the related Ready for ODA program for software suppliers
- ODA in a Box: a new initiative driven by member companies is developing pre-integrated ODA-compliant software solutions to simplify ODA deployments for smaller operators. This will be the Duplo equivalent to the Lego-like ODA Components.
Find out more about our CIT and Ecosystem mission.
