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Sigrid Braun, Enterprise Architect, Deutsche Telekom IT, discusses the work of TM Forum's Innovation on the ODA Canvas and how it helps the communication service provider serve its customers.
Joanne Taaffe, TM ForumDT’s Sigrid Braun on how innovation can ‘turn customers into fans'
Set up in 2023, TM Forum’s Innovation Hub provides a physical and virtual space where communications service providers (CSPs) and their partners can accelerate their work on priority projects.
Sigrid Braun, Enterprise Architect, Deutsche Telekom IT, has been involved in the Innovation Hub since it was a pilot project. Now a member of its board, she met up with Inform to discuss the Innovation Hub’s work on the ODA Canvas, which provides an execution environment for Open Digital Architecture components such as product catalogs, order management systems and more.
Braun’s involvement in the Innovation Hub stems from her experience of collaborating on an award-winning TM Forum Catalyst. The Innovation Hub, however, goes a step further than Catalysts by identifying key concepts that benefit the whole industry, and pooling resources to accelerate their transformation into business implementations.
Participants in the Innovation Hub work virtually together and meet each other in shorter bursts of a week at a time, says Braun. Teams also take part in daily stand-ups and weekly deep dives, which combine to create a cohesive global team, explains Braun.
“It is really important to come together face to face from time to time and to get to know each other, because trust grows and that really accelerates innovation.”
There are several streams within the Innovation Hub, including the development of AIVA, a GenAI conversational search tool. As part of Deutsche Telekom’s IT team in charge of retiring legacy software, however, Braun has focused largely on the componentization and cloudification of the IT landscape. In the Innovation Hub she is working alongside experts from other companies such as Jio, Google, Orange, Vodafone, and Accenture.
“I'm part of the IT retirement team in Deutsche Telekom so I know how hard it is to migrate old monoliths into modern components,” she says. “Microservices, or digital platform services [make it] much easier to deliver business value and to upgrade smaller pieces when modernization is necessary.”
Open APIs, of course, already provide an interface to integrate software from different vendors, and “in Deutsche Telekom, we derive our API developments from Open APIs,” says Braun. The ODA meanwhile sets out to drastically simplify the integration of IT systems through the development of standardized plug-and-play components that enable zero-touch operations. These components, however, need to plug into a cloud-native runtime environment. This is where TM Forum’s ODA Canvas steps in.
“If you look at what a complete microservice needs to be deployed and to run, you need much more than the functional interface which is provided by the Open APIs,” she says. “You need security, you need observability, you need API management, and so on. The Canvas is the execution environment for these microservices or for these components.”
Decomposing into microservices is important, explains Braun, because they will make it much faster and easier to deliver services that meet customers’ specific requirements.
“When we say we want to fully automate everything around the components, and microservices in the cloud it’s not because we are crazy techies,” she adds. “It is because at Deutsche Telekom we focus on customers and want to turn customers into fans. And with ODA Canvas automation I think we really can do that.”
CSPs and cloud providers can use the ODA Canvas reference, which became available in January 2025, to develop their own canvases. Deutsche Telekom’s iteration of the Canvas, for example, is called Magenta Canvas.
And collaboration on the Canvas at the Innovation Hub attracts a passionate, international team, according to Braun.
A top priority of current ODA development is embedding AI into components. “Generative AI can accelerate our industry a lot and bring us a lot of cost savings and increases in productivity. “We are thinking about how to embed AI capabilities into the components and which capabilities the Canvas provides for AI. That's the real innovation,” points out Braun.
The first challenge of embedding AI into components was identifying where to begin, she explains. Adjacent work on building generative AI applications with large language models in the Innovation Hub, however, provided the springboard.
“You could say the vector databases that are used for generative AI applications are a special form of persistence.,” explains Braun. “At the beginning, we struggled a little bit to identify the AI use cases and working on a fraud scenario was a good start. But with this view on the persistence and how AI applications interact with the foundational models, we got started on our first steps how the canvas enables a component by providing a vector database”
As a member of the Innovation Hub, Deutsche Telekom takes part in discussions on where to focus efforts.
“We really have open-minded discussions within the Innovation Hub. Deutsche Telekom for example is driving security topics, because we value them as quite important,” Braun notes. “We go with the approach of zero trust, so we must implement security as code.”
Stability is another important area for Deutsche Telekom’s IT team. “We want to have a simplified development process and faster contribution of new releases, and for that, you need the automation for the Canvas release process,” Braun explains.
Teams within the Innovation Hub have also been exploring “how to make life for developers and engineers easier so that they can really focus on the business logic,” she adds.
Here again, Deutsche Telekom benefits from exchange with experts from other companies. “Jio Platforms were very much interested to learn about our ambitions and our view on developer experience, and we had two deep-dive sessions with that team, and the same took place with Vodafone,” says Braun. “A very nice side effect from working in in the Innovation Hub is to get inspiration and to look over the edge of the plate to see what is happening in other companies.”
