DTW24-Ignite: TM Forum Innovation Hub creates ODA code and a GenAI tool called TM Forum AIVA

Launched nine months ago at DTW23-Ignite, the TM Forum Innovation Hub is changing the way communications service providers (CSPs) collaborate with their suppliers and partners. Nearly 70 people from eight companies – Accenture, Deutsche Telekom, Google, Jio, Microsoft, Orange, Telenor and Vodafone – are jointly developing code in the hub, and TM Forum plans to open it to more companies later this year.

“We are looking forward to welcoming other companies into the Innovation Hub as we believe that this is the best way to drive industry innovation at scale,” says Aaron Boasman-Patel, VP of AI, Labs and Innovation at TM Forum.

The Innovation Hub is critical to advancing TM Forum’s work on the Open Digital Architecture (ODA), AI and Autonomous Networks (AN). The hub’s team members are currently collaborating in three areas:

• Accelerating deployment of ODA by creating a reference Canvas, which is a cloud-native deployment environment for IT and network components
• Developing TM Forum’s large language model, TM Forum AIVA (AI Virtual Assistant)
• Experimenting to identify new services to help CSPs increase revenue

Advances in each area are being demonstrated at DTW24-Ignite in Copenhagen this week.

Necessity, the mother of invention

The Innovation Hub is a physical lab hosted by Jio at the Reliance Corporate Park in Mumbai, India. The idea was born out of a challenge that TM Forum members are facing as their collaboration becomes less theoretical, more practical and more technical.

“A decade ago, everything was just very high-level frameworks, so the people engaged in the collaboration community were architects and business analysts,” explains Vodafone Group’s Dr. Lester Thomas, Head of New Technologies and Innovation, and leader of ODA acceleration in the Innovation Hub. “When we started doing the work on the Open APIs and later the ODA components and Canvas, we needed to engage software engineers and site reliability engineers, and we did really struggle to find people.”

Jio proposed hosting a brick-and-mortar lab where TM Forum member companies could send employees to collaborate using an open source-style approach to build a reference implementation of the ODA Canvas and a generative AI tool to help TM Forum members search for assets and information. The seven founding members and Microsoft, which joined the group in April, have each contributed the equivalent of two full-time employees to the lab.

“In Vodafone, they are two people from our Telco-as-a-Service team, and they’re based only about 150 kilometers from where the Jio office is,” says Thomas. “We’re making it part of their career development. So, we have people who do this on secondment – we’ve got two full-time equivalent people, but they can roll out of their jobs to do this as an innovation and career development exercise. Then, they roll back into the Vodafone team, and we get two different people to collaborate.”

Deutsche Telekom’s Sigrid Braun, an Enterprise IT Architect, is a member of the teams that are developing the ODA Canvas and TM Forum AIVA. “In both streams, we are developing real implementations together, and I see that this already changes how we are collaborating,” she says. “This work includes telcos, hyperscalers and others – and it’s really about forming a team across these different companies, across different time zones, and across cultures as well. So, it’s really an exciting experience to work on the projects.”

Introducing TM Forum AIVA

The Innovation Hub has produced a beta version of TM Forum’s new generative AI search tool, TM Forum AIVA, which is now integrated into the TM Forum website allowing users to search TM Forum’s assets. TM Forum AIVA is being developed using Google Gemini, and Google is sponsoring a hackathon at DTW this week featuring teams from Jio, Deutsche Telekom and Telenor using TM Forum AIVA to address sustainable business challenges, from component deployment to autonomous network design.

The TM Forum AIVA team is also working to enable the tool to generate Open API specifications. “We are using Gemini to have a natural language query and then generate an Open API spec,” explains Priya Saxena, Strategic Cloud Engineer at Google and an active participant in TM Forum’s Innovation Hub. “That will make it even easier for CSPs to move between clouds and between different vendors.”

This work is part of “Horizon 3” in the hub because it is forward looking. Horizon 1 efforts to get the hub up and running are complete. Now, the team is focusing on Horizon 2, which includes improving general availability of the Canvas for wide-scale use, and beginning work on Horizon 3.

Tackling fraud

In addition to the ODA Canvas and TM Forum AIVA, a third area of focus in the Innovation Hub is on developing and testing new services that CSPs could sell to their customers to generate new revenue. Reducing fraud is one of the first areas the team is targeting.

“The problem of fraudulent calls is a global problem,” says Dr. Sudhir Mittal, EVP & Chief Architect, Jio Platforms. “Fraudulent calls and messaging are really taking people to task, and we don’t have many answers.”

Innovation Hub members are developing an overarching framework for creating components and APIs to address fraudulent activity, starting with a white paper to outline the challenges and potential solutions.

“Various concepts of how these fraudulent calls or messages can be contained are put together in the framework, and then specific components can be defined from this framework with some Open APIs,” Mittal explains. “Then, that work can be picked up by anyone to provide those components and deploy them on the Canvas to make them interoperable.”

Vodafone’s Thomas likes the idea of collaborating with other CSPs to develop services to combat fraud. “It’s better if telcos collaborate, because the fraud is all based on data,” he explains. “If we have enough data to enable detection of fraudulent activity, it’s a benefit to everyone, and it’s one of those products or services we could offer that everyone in society would agree is a good thing.”

What’s next for the Innovation Hub?

Participants’ long-term vision for the Innovation Hub overall is to expand its reach and capabilities.

“Eventually, we’d like to have multiple TM Forum Innovation Hubs to take that pattern of collaboration global,” says Thomas. “It would be great to have one in each region, where we can run these sorts of projects, perhaps with a different hyperscaler anchoring each.”

He adds: “The hubs effectively would have to collaborate with each other in an open-source style so that there’s only one ODA Canvas open-source repository that everyone is collaborating to enhance.”