Lessons in being agile – show, don't tell

The Virtualization and Business Agility conference track was bursting with energy and engagement. Even at the end of a packed two days at TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore, the participants were enthusiastic in sharing their views about key topics and next steps.

What we confirmed or learned

• Digital transformation contains a lot of ideas – it’s about a lot more than technology; it involves a major cultural change if it is to succeed


• Future services are going to be mashed-up offerings that telco must support – so open APIs are very important and a good way to standardize and reduce efforts


• Sharing is good – for example, BT and NTT were very open about their transformation progress


• We’d like to hear more from customers, though digital transformation is affecting a lot of industries, not just telecoms


• A paradigm shift is needed for BSS/OSS transformation


• We like workshops, such as the pre-event one to develop a Digital Maturity Model and Metrics – being able to share and exchange views is a great opportunity in dealing with a common issue


• We must prepare the support structure for future services


• Open APIs are good for various industries, not just telcos


• New ideas on segmentation were really interesting


• We would like to share more about how to cope with rising amounts of video traffic while maintaining business as usual during transformation to being digital


• We’d like to create a standardized IT platform, including from legacy silos, using NFV technology


• How telcos are starting to observe IoT and downstream apps to protect and retain customers – but we need to understand a lot more about monetization and use cases

These are some of the things we want do next

• We need to explore more about NFV/SDN and IoT-type services


• We would like more sharing about HOW companies do things, not just why


• The new areas like blockchain, digital health and smart cities, are real eye-openers for telcos and we want to hear more about them via the Forum


• In NFV and SDN deployments, we need all the endpoints to be ‘fiberized’ – the last mile is the challenge is we want true NFV from end to end


• We are not familiar with what telcos can do regarding manufacturing and want to know more


• Future revenues for vendors are not clear, given what telcos are saying about what they need


• We’d like to hear points of view other than telcos about ecosystems and platforms, and how it will all work together


• Do we need an open catalog for telcos to expose and their capabilities?


• We want to hear from startups and HOW they work and how they view telcos – get those people to come in and share


• More Catalyst demonstrations here in Asia, the same kind of level as at TM Forum Live! in Nice