My Upskilling Story: Telefonica RAITT Academy with TM Forum Powers Radical BSS Transformation

In 2020, Telefónica Germany launched a bold programme to become a fully digital, converged operator - radically overhauling its legacy IT architecture. With six fragmented BSS stacks, vendor complexity, and systems over 20 years old, the landscape hindered agility and cost to serve . The answer was RAITT - Radical Architecture and IT Transformation - a full-stack modernisation to consolidate down to two BSS platforms, built on best of bride , cloud-native and Open API-first. The programme aimed to slash time to market, simplify integration, and enable an omnichannel customer experience.

From the outset, Telefónica recognised that technical change alone wasn’t enough. Withover 3,000 people involved - including delivery units, architecture teams, systemintegrators(TechM ,Wipro) , and product vendors (e.g., Salesforce, Hansen ,Matrixx ) - ashared language was essential. Telefónica standardised on TM Forum frameworks(Open APIs, ODA components, eTOM, SID, Customer Experience, Digital Ecosystems) as the backbone of delivery and capability definition. In mid-2021, it launched a company-wide TM Forum-aligned upskilling programme, supported by a "train-the-trainer" model and deep partner engagement.

This evolved into the RAITT Academy, Telefónica’s structured onboarding and skills programme for all transformation participants - reaching c. 1,500 people per year. The impact has been remarkable: several brands with 14+ million customers are now live on the RAITT stack. Telefónica launched its first brand just 14 months after programme start, deployed 79 applications to the public cloud, and now runs 30+ certified TM Forum Open APIs. Development costs have dropped by over 40%, with time to market improving by a similar margin - proving that skills, standards, and structure are essential to successful digital transformation.