ODA components garner growing industry support

“ODA is a kind of Rosetta Stones for telco capabilities, says Adriano Poloni, Managing Director, Accenture. “In the future we expect it to become a de facto standard, just a mandatory pre-requisite, like Open API conformance is already.”

Gustavo Jerónimo Ochovo, DevOps & Cloud Architect at Alvatross by SATEC, cites the involvement of major CSPs such as Orange, Vodafone and Telefónica in defining ODA as one of the reasons he believes it will be the “de facto standard in the digital services business.” And, importantly, he adds “leading vendors are investing more and more resources, which strengthens it even more.”

The aim of TM Forum’s ODA Component project is to define and create reusable, modular, standardized, machine readable software components that encapsulate functions which CSPs can use as building blocks to quickly create differentiated products and services. And which can be managed and operated in a standard way.

One of the advantages of standardized components is that they will help make TM Forum’s ODA 100% machine readable, allowing CSPs to identify the components they need to build agile and autonomous cloud native IT and network systems.

The problem CSPs face as they adopt cloud-native technologies is that a containerized, cloud-native application may work well in isolation, but be unable to automatically communicate its functionality to other applications, or to transmit what it itself needs to operate. In addition, each application will be managed in a different way, making operations complex and expensive.

TM Forum’s ODA component model sets out to solve the problem by providing a consistent way for components to fully interoperate end-to-end across multivendor ecosystems.

“It’s not just about the open APIs that we expose, it’s the data semantics, the data persistence, for example, across the different components that interact, as well as their behavior, according to Richard Williams, Senior Director, Delivery and Architecture Strategy, Oracle, speaking during a TM Forum Accelerate workshop in February.

Lester Thomas, Chief IT Systems Architect at Vodafone Group, Vodafone, has likened components to Lego blocks, which conform to underlying design guidelines, but which can be used in multiple different and creative ways, thereby allowing CSPs to become faster and more innovative in developing services.

ODA and components represent a marked shift in how telcos use software to drive their business.

“The adoption of ODA enables a true 360-degree transformation of the core tech, go-to-market strategies and different business models. It also allows CSPs to become industry orchestrators, powering the next wave of innovation across industries and enabling the creation of marketplaces for software,” according to Gateano Biancardi, Innovation Chief Architect, Telecommunications, Senior Manager, Milan Office at Accenture.

Managing complex ecosystems

Standardization and interoperability will be essential if CSPs are to manage the complexity of creating and managing different 5G and IoT and platform ecosystems.

“The platform economy … demands much better ecosystem interoperability and so, the ODA value ultimately resides in building and evolving from legacy to a more comprehensive, detailed and interoperable reference architecture for the CSP community, with very actionable standardized components, with open APIs, well defined events, all specified in a machine-readable format,” according to Accenture’s Poloni.

Oracle, for example, is looking at the role of ODA components in multi-canvas, multi cloud deployments. “Obviously, we’re really moving into the SaaS space. So, it’s very relevant to us to consider how different canvases supported by different clouds can work together,” according to Oracle’s Williams.

“We went on a journey, starting with the basic constructs of what APIs are provided or consumed and getting into the nuances of the behavioral models, [looking at the] function of the component as part of the behavior of the end-to-end solution and using use cases to test our assumptions about the behavior requirements of that component,” explained Williams.

WhaleCloud and Sigscale meanwhile both point out the advantages of ODA components when collaborating within multivendor environments.

“When collaborating across several projects at once, vendors need a simpler approach to understanding and managing service requirements and project delivery milestones so that they can reduce delays and stay within budget,” says Cece Li, Product Operation Director, Whale Cloud.

“The ODA Component model is important to SigScale because we offer several best-of-breed solutions, not complete suites, so integration with other vendors is essential. ODA provides the architecture for component interactions, while the Open APIs define the interfaces,” says Vance Shipley, CEO, SigScale Global Inc.