Communications service providers (CSPs) are under pressure to transform to deliver new services at the same pace as digital natives. However, their legacy infrastructure slows them down. Business support systems (BSS) are typically inflexible due to tight integrations and heavy customization.This makes it hard for CSPs to launch new products at the speed required to compete, and developing each time from scratch is expensive. They also face high costs due to the constant need to maintain and upgrade legacy platforms. To make matters worse, BSS complexity increases security risks.
This doesn’t mean CSPs need to throw out their existing systems and rebuild from scratch – they can’t afford to.
A TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept has put forward a way to solve this, enabling CSPs to use their existing infrastructure to create new services fast, and trade these applications with other telcos to maximize their impact and minimize repeated effort.
The
App Trading Marketplace Catalyst created a platform which enables CSPs to decouple legacy BSS capabilities and publish them via application program interfaces (APIs) to facilitate rapid microservices-based development. The team has also developed a ‘marketplace’ – much like Apple or Android’s app stores, where CSPs can capitalize on this new-found flexibility by publishing their own applications for use by other CSPs, and by integrating other CSPs’ tools into their own offerings in non-competing geographies.
Sweating existing assets
The champions of the
App Trading Marketplace project, who set the business challenge, are Dialog, Deutsche Telekom and Robi Axiata, supported by participants Axiata Digital Labs, Apptium, Ericsson and Huawei, who each make a specific contribution to the solution.
Dialog, for instance, needed to migrate its charging platform to a new version. This was a challenge since over a hundred external applications were using the platform. Traditionally, all the external applications would need to be updated to the requirements of the new charging system.
The Catalyst’s ‘middle layer’ platform does the ‘conversion’ to the new requirements of the platform via APIs, meaning no updates to the applications are required.
Udaya Priyankara, Axiata Digital Labs, explains: “We are trying to ensure investment security for CSPs – instead of replacing them, they can reuse their legacy platforms to introduce new digital services to customers.
“Also, instead of developing all these services from scratch, CSPs can reduce the time to market by downloading an application from the marketplace and hosting it in their own environment.”
He adds: “Until this marketplace, there hasn’t been a way for CSPs to share their success stories and collaborate like this.”
Future-proof solutions
At the TM Forum Digital Transformation Asia event in Kuala Lumpur recently, the team demonstrated their solution in the context of an insurance application, developed and shared by Dialog. However, the types of applications CSPs could create and share are virtually unlimited and span across sectors and verticals.
Further, because the tools were created in line with TM Forum best practices and standards, they’re “future-proof,” said Priyankara.
The platform was developed using
TM Forum’s Digital Platform Reference Architecture (DPRA) and
TM Forum Open APIs. The marketplace was created in line with
TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA), a standardized ‘blueprint’ for the design of open digital platforms.
Through its work, the Catalyst team will extend 12 TM Forum Open APIs, as well as contribute six brand new ones related to updating a profile; activating marketplace partners; creating product categories; updating products; and creating and updating terms and conditions.
In terms of the team roles, Apptium Technologies provided the marketplace; Huawei delivered its In Touch solution and cloud platform for implementation; Ericsson provided catalog management; and Axiata Digital Labs designed the middle layer platform which is used to export, download and host applications.
The team plans to develop the Catalyst further, to include settlement between CSPs for marketplace apps and to add new platform use cases – particularly related to 5G and the internet of things.