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Meet TM Forum’s outstanding contributors

TM Forum has recognized three outstanding contributors, an outstanding contribution from a company and an award-winning Catalyst proof of concept. All have made valuable contributions back to the Collaboration Program and were presented with awards at Action Week in Libson, Portgual

Dawn BushausDawn Bushaus
06 Feb 2020
Meet TM Forum’s outstanding contributors

Meet TM Forum’s outstanding contributors

TM Forum has recognized three outstanding contributors, an outstanding contribution from a company and an award-winning Catalyst proof of concept. All have made valuable contributions back to the Collaboration Program and were presented with awards at Action Week in Libson, Portgual.

At every Action Week event, we recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to TM Forum’s collaborative work. These individuals spend countless hours beyond their ‘day jobs’ working on the important standards and best practices that TM Forum contributes to the communications industry. Their dedication inspires us. This year, for the first time, we also recognized a company – Deutsche Telekom – for its outstanding contributions.

Gjurgjica (Gina) Pesheva – Deutsche Telekom

Gina is a TM Forum pioneer. As one of the founders and leaders of the Business Assurance Project, her exemplary leadership and knowledge have helped create the Business Assurance Framework which is critical to telco operations. Gina leads the work on “how” to integrate business assurance into telco operations. Her efforts have helped with representing business assurance in the Business Process Framework, through creation of new domains and restructuring of past revenue assurance elements.

As a long-standing contributor to this program, Gina has created a large part of the material in the GB941A Revenue Assurance Balanced Scorecard. She has exhibited strong leadership, with consistent and sustained contributions and active participation over many years.

Luca Franco Varvello – Huawei


Luca’s exemplary contribution has covered many key projects in the AI & Data Analytics Project, including leading the AI Management, AIOps and AI Maturity workstreams. Not only has he made individual contributions to the work, he has also used TM Forum Catalysts to facilitate the work and take it from “theory to practice”. One example is the AI Maturity Model. Luca led seven communications service providers (CSPs) through the maturity model and fed back comments to improve the model.
His most recent role has been to lead the AIOps workstream, which is exploring the challenges of redesigning and re-engineering operational processes to support and govern deployment of AI. Luca’s collaborative style is extremely effective in bringing out the best of all team members by providing support and guidance while valuing all inputs and viewpoints.


Vance Shipley – Sigscale


Vance has been a prolific contributor to the Open Digital Architecture (ODA) Project, ensuring alignment across Open APIs, the Information Framework (SID) and ODA with the objective of creating substantial technical assets to underpin ODA production. Vance’s breadth of knowledge, specifically about resource function activation, alarm management JSON/swagger, 5G models and resource topology discovery models has enriched the program.
In addition, his contribution has been instrumental in supporting the Resource Management APIs. Vance has shown strong leadership abilities and is an excellent team player who always focuses on the issues, listens carefully to alternative views and responds professionally to all point of views.

Company Award – Deutsche Telekom


The first-ever company contributor award acknowledges an organization’s effort in encouraging its members to contribute to TM Forum’s Collaboration Program. In the past six months, Deutsche Telekom has had three outstanding contributors in the Open API Program and Digital Ecosystem Program.
Alexis De-Peufeilhoux and Thomas Braun have been exemplary contributors in the development of TM Forum assets such as the Geographic Address API, Design Guidelines, Resource Inventory API, Resource Activation and Configuration API and Event API. Thomas Brunk has shown leadership skills in the Business Assurance Project by leading sessions at Action Week and has been instrumental in developing the Business Architecture Practice Guidebook. His strong background has laid the foundation to align the business capabilities with TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture. All three have shown great leadership and have been extremely effective in bringing the best out of all team members by providing support and guidance needed.

Outstanding Catalyst – Digital Transformation Asia


The Blockchain-based 5G Collaboration Economy – Phase II Catalyst proof of concept showcases a collaborative business model to offset the huge gaps between 5G capital investments and revenue generated. With China Telecom and China Unicom as the Catalyst champions who set the challenge, the participants collaborating around the solution were IBM, Whale Cloud and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).
The team developed a proposed solution to address some of the key outstanding questions and challenges around infrastructure-sharing:

  • How to raise funds in an open and transparent way before building shared infrastructure

  • How to ensure collaboration is efficient and maintains trust

  • How to reach a leasing agreement rapidly and evaluate the service objectively

  • How to get statistics and ensure fast, error-free settlement