Digital marketplace spins up multi-component IoT services, fast
The second phase of this Catalyst project supports complete remote set-up and management of complex smart solutions out on an enterprise customer’s site.
31 Oct 2019
Digital marketplace spins up multi-component IoT services, fast
New devices and software, enabled by technologies such as 5G, edge computing, internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) are opening the door for telcos and their suppliers to create innovative services and generate revenue in new sectors. Promising markets include smart cities, smart home, energy, manufacturing, agriculture, security and public safety.
In theory, product managers can combine and connect various services, devices and data to solve an ever-changing series of challenges, from congestion and enterprise security to industrial predictive maintenance.
However, technical challenges remain to making this a reality, including fragmented component standards, complexity and the associated high costs, and security and privacy risks due to high levels of customisation. These issues also make it impossible to achieve the scale and speed required for business models to be viable.
A multi-phased TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept is addressing these challenges to enable enterprise product managers to browse, select, configure, buy, receive and be charged for goods and services as easily as consumers can shop online.
Champions of the latest phase of the Digital Business Marketplace project are BT, Deutsche Telekom, NTT, T-Mobile and Verizon. Catalyst champions set out a business challenge, with each bringing a unique angle based on geography, strategy and more. They work alongside the Catalyst participants – in this case, Accenture, AWS, Agile Fractal Grid, BearingPoint//Beyond, Digiglu and Intel – to develop solutions to the specific challenge over three to six months. Each provides a different piece to the solution puzzle and Verizon, Accenture and AWS joined as new members of the Catalyst team for this second iteration.
In the previous phase of the project, the Digital Business Marketplace team worked together to create the framework for a ‘marketplace’ platform which offers automated device connectivity, attestation, bootstrapping and device management options which customers can select in a simple-to-use shopping cart experience.
Behind the shopping cart interface, the underlying complexity required to orchestrate the required products and services is fully automated.
The platform also ensures that each supplier and reselling partner can package their offering and be paid for the consumption of their part of an end solution.
The marketplace is based on the following principles:
The solution includes zero-touch patents from BT, BearingPoint//Beyond’s Infonova Digital Business Partnering Platform, and Digiglu’s digital self-service shopping cart experience. Intel’s Secure Device Onboard (SDO) automated ‘zero-touch’ service allows a device to be drop-shipped and powered on to dynamically provision to a customer’s IoT platform of choice in seconds.
Phase two of the work, which was delivered in just seven weeks, built on automated partnering, frictionless trading and SDO-enabled IoT device orchestration, expanding the scope to include key infrastructure devices such as gateways and routers which have also now been SDO-enabled. This supports complete remote set-up and management of complex smart solutions out on an enterprise customer’s site.yo
Andrew Thomson, Senior VP Digital Enablement at BearingPoint & Distinguished Fellow, TM Forum, explained: “Order management and fulfilment across the ecosystem partner supply chain can be carried out in a fully secure way, and it will now only take a matter of minutes to onboard masses of IoT devices once they have been physically installed and powered up. The shopping cart offers full clarity of what will be paid for according to the various options selected, and the customer portal provides full in-life device management for individual or batches of IoT devices. Suddenly, cost-effective secure deployment and management of millions of IoT devices becomes feasible for IoT service providers, and an affordable reality for customers.”
“Phase two also added the capability to remotely deploy virtualized network functions (VNFs) for software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN), Wi-Fi, Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), 5G etc. from the cloud,” Thomson said.
The latest findings of the Digital Business Marketplace Catalyst will be showcased at Digital Transformation Asia (November 12-14, Kuala Lumpur). Attendees will be led through the experience of a retail product manager who is creating a surveillance service for a new store. The package requires a camera, a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) connectivity service, customer premises equipment CPE for running the services, a private LTE service for connecting the cameras in the store, and a solution for connecting the cloud and video surveillance service.
When the shopping cart purchase is complete, the order is sent to the backend systems where the devices are prepared for shipping. All the devices are SDO-enabled via device manufacturer configuration and ownership is registered to the target platform (BT in this case). Once received, the device powers on and connects to the SDO service and is on-boarded. The product manager will receive a confirmation and soon start to see sensor data streaming.
Other examples of multi-component offerings which could be quickly created via the Digital Business Marketplace include preventative maintenance services, security products and farming use cases such as precision farming using drones and machine learning.
For instance, a smart grid consortium, led by Agile Fractal Grid, is designing an approach to increase grid efficiency and protect substations from electric grid backbone voltage spikes. For these use cases, compute-at-the-edge, security, IoT and AI are required to disconnect and reroute power within milliseconds to protect the local systems and to provide continuity of power. With Agile Fractal Grid as a participant, the Catalyst will help to advance this work.
Looking ahead, Thomson said: “The next phase of the Catalyst will be to build out more vertical solutions as well as to formulate the various contracting and service level agreement (SLA) terms necessary to facilitate the ‘click-through’ world for the plug-and-play partnering of the various industry 4.0 scenarios.”
In theory, product managers can combine and connect various services, devices and data to solve an ever-changing series of challenges, from congestion and enterprise security to industrial predictive maintenance.
However, technical challenges remain to making this a reality, including fragmented component standards, complexity and the associated high costs, and security and privacy risks due to high levels of customisation. These issues also make it impossible to achieve the scale and speed required for business models to be viable.
A multi-phased TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept is addressing these challenges to enable enterprise product managers to browse, select, configure, buy, receive and be charged for goods and services as easily as consumers can shop online.
Champions of the latest phase of the Digital Business Marketplace project are BT, Deutsche Telekom, NTT, T-Mobile and Verizon. Catalyst champions set out a business challenge, with each bringing a unique angle based on geography, strategy and more. They work alongside the Catalyst participants – in this case, Accenture, AWS, Agile Fractal Grid, BearingPoint//Beyond, Digiglu and Intel – to develop solutions to the specific challenge over three to six months. Each provides a different piece to the solution puzzle and Verizon, Accenture and AWS joined as new members of the Catalyst team for this second iteration.
The solution
In the previous phase of the project, the Digital Business Marketplace team worked together to create the framework for a ‘marketplace’ platform which offers automated device connectivity, attestation, bootstrapping and device management options which customers can select in a simple-to-use shopping cart experience.
Behind the shopping cart interface, the underlying complexity required to orchestrate the required products and services is fully automated.
The platform also ensures that each supplier and reselling partner can package their offering and be paid for the consumption of their part of an end solution.
The marketplace is based on the following principles:
- Removal of manual processes by achieving secure and automated fulfilment and lifecycle management of end-to-end solutions and their constituent components, such as IoT devices, products, applications and services.
- Easy creation and configuration of new, smart market solutions that are composed of multiple resources, services, technical rules and business rules from different partners.
- Provision of secure, tamper-proof devices and systems, with a fully traceable, federated and automated secure supply chain.
- Frictionless trading between different organisations where the ecosystem partners can be certain that their technical dependency rules are being respected and reflected within the shopping cart and where they can be sure of being properly compensated for their contribution according to their pricing.
- Definition of industry-agnostic repeatable patterns to enable “plug-and-play” onboarding of business partners and their services so that all industries can rapidly scale and accelerate their smart offerings.
- Appropriate systems and tools to enable product managers to launch, manage and monetize their new smart solutions.
The solution includes zero-touch patents from BT, BearingPoint//Beyond’s Infonova Digital Business Partnering Platform, and Digiglu’s digital self-service shopping cart experience. Intel’s Secure Device Onboard (SDO) automated ‘zero-touch’ service allows a device to be drop-shipped and powered on to dynamically provision to a customer’s IoT platform of choice in seconds.
Expanding the scope
Phase two of the work, which was delivered in just seven weeks, built on automated partnering, frictionless trading and SDO-enabled IoT device orchestration, expanding the scope to include key infrastructure devices such as gateways and routers which have also now been SDO-enabled. This supports complete remote set-up and management of complex smart solutions out on an enterprise customer’s site.yo
Andrew Thomson, Senior VP Digital Enablement at BearingPoint & Distinguished Fellow, TM Forum, explained: “Order management and fulfilment across the ecosystem partner supply chain can be carried out in a fully secure way, and it will now only take a matter of minutes to onboard masses of IoT devices once they have been physically installed and powered up. The shopping cart offers full clarity of what will be paid for according to the various options selected, and the customer portal provides full in-life device management for individual or batches of IoT devices. Suddenly, cost-effective secure deployment and management of millions of IoT devices becomes feasible for IoT service providers, and an affordable reality for customers.”
“Phase two also added the capability to remotely deploy virtualized network functions (VNFs) for software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN), Wi-Fi, Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), 5G etc. from the cloud,” Thomson said.
In action
The latest findings of the Digital Business Marketplace Catalyst will be showcased at Digital Transformation Asia (November 12-14, Kuala Lumpur). Attendees will be led through the experience of a retail product manager who is creating a surveillance service for a new store. The package requires a camera, a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) connectivity service, customer premises equipment CPE for running the services, a private LTE service for connecting the cameras in the store, and a solution for connecting the cloud and video surveillance service.
When the shopping cart purchase is complete, the order is sent to the backend systems where the devices are prepared for shipping. All the devices are SDO-enabled via device manufacturer configuration and ownership is registered to the target platform (BT in this case). Once received, the device powers on and connects to the SDO service and is on-boarded. The product manager will receive a confirmation and soon start to see sensor data streaming.
Other examples of multi-component offerings which could be quickly created via the Digital Business Marketplace include preventative maintenance services, security products and farming use cases such as precision farming using drones and machine learning.
For instance, a smart grid consortium, led by Agile Fractal Grid, is designing an approach to increase grid efficiency and protect substations from electric grid backbone voltage spikes. For these use cases, compute-at-the-edge, security, IoT and AI are required to disconnect and reroute power within milliseconds to protect the local systems and to provide continuity of power. With Agile Fractal Grid as a participant, the Catalyst will help to advance this work.
Looking ahead, Thomson said: “The next phase of the Catalyst will be to build out more vertical solutions as well as to formulate the various contracting and service level agreement (SLA) terms necessary to facilitate the ‘click-through’ world for the plug-and-play partnering of the various industry 4.0 scenarios.”
