ODA Unboxed: Inspur’s ODA alignment drives revenue increases of 60% compared to the same period last year

Headquartered in China, Inspur offers cutting-edge technologies that empower enterprises worldwide to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. With a commitment to innovation, Inspur drives advancements in areas such as AI, big data, and Open Computing, providing tailored solutions that meet the evolving needs of diverse industries. Jay Sun, GM of Inspur OBD shared how being accredited Ready for ODA has helped Inspur improve their business agility and contributed to a revenue increase of 60%.

What is the functional scope of your product(s) that have achieved Ready for ODA status?

The Inspur IBS product solution has achieved "Ready for ODA" status, covering 32 core components and 35 associated Open APIs. These include key modules such as Product Catalog, Product Configurator, Product Order Capture and Validation, Service Catalog, Service Order, Service Inventory, Resource Catalog, Resource Order, and Resource Inventory. This year, all OpenAI’s related to IBS products have passed the TM Forum Open API Certification, and we have decoupled traditional OSS and BSS systems to map them to ODA components.

We plan to migrate IBS products service to ODA components by 2025, and manage our components through the TMF Canvas. Our goal is to obtain the TMF ODA Component certification to ensure our components are compliant with TMF standards.

Why was it important for you to align these product(s) to ODA?

The 3 key challenges required by our customers we leverage ODA to solve are:

Modularity: In ODA, the traditional chimney BSS/OSS applications change to multiple components, which allows customers to select and combine different functional modules based on their specific needs, making it easier to build and expand their digital ecosystems.

Standardization: TMF ODA architecture defines a set of standardized APIs and interfaces, ensuring that different systems and components can interoperate seamlessly. This reduces integration costs and time.

Flexibility: ODA together with TMF Canvas supports various deployment methods, including traditional On-Premise, VM, and latest cloud with cloud-native and micro services architectures, allowing customers to choose the most suitable deployment approach based on their business needs and technical environment.

Aligning with ODA is a strategic move that enhances our product value, improves market positioning, and supports long-term business growth in the digital age.

What tangible benefits did it bring to you and your customers?

In the past few years, Inspur has been deeply involved and aligned with TMF ODA. We have transformed 32 ODA components, certified 66 Open API’s, won multiple Catalyst awards, which significantly enhanced our brand's visibility and market influence.

This year, we published our own devops platform based on TMF ODA Canvas specification, realized all the components seamless plug ins and combined an integrated solution. Products based on the ODA architecture contributed nearly 40% of our revenue, which led to a revenue increase of 60% compared to the same period last year.

For our R&D, based on the standardized components Open API and Canvas platform, we are able to quickly develop and build solutions that can quickly and better meet customer requirements, this has led to a more than 50% improvement in product development and operational efficiency.

For our customers, ODA based products can improve business agility and IT operational efficiency. For example, we provided product catalog and service catalog components to Ethiopian Telecom, helping customers reduce the new product launch time from weeks level to hours level, we served service catalog, resource catalog, service order and service inventory components to Saudi Dawiyat and helped customers shorten service fulfillment time from 14 days to 2 days (including field work time).

What challenges did you face in adopting ODA as your reference architecture, and how did you tackle these?

The main challenge we had to overcome was the lack of deep understanding of TMF ODA standards. This led to difficulties in managing the operations and maintenance of components and tracking the latest standard document.

Fortunately, TM Forum provides various resources, including best practices, industry standards, and collaborative projects. By participating in ODA projects and engaging in discussions within the TMF community, we were able to get involved in ODA and overcome this challenge.

Moreover, we have joined the ODA-CA project and developed the Inspur Canvas platform based on the laboratory reference Canvas. Our platform offers end-to-end management for component publication, deployment, operations, and governance, including capabilities in DevOps, API gateway, service mesh, log management, monitoring, and security.

How did your staff gain expertise with ODA and learn how to use it effectively?

We mainly gained ODA expertise through TM Forum ODA training courses and community, through training we obtained a systematic knowledge of ODA. Through the TMF community we can then discuss and explore some detailed questions with other members.

Today, we have 140 Skill Paths Certified and Career Certified Professionals and 163 Knowledge Certified Professionals covering product managers, product architects and solution architects and developers. We also have 40 staff members involved in the development of ODA standards, who are respectively participating in Components and Canvas, End to End ODA, Open API, and ODA-CA projects. In the future, we will further enhance team participation and strive to make positive contributions to component specifications and Canvas development.

Currently, all of our product-related Open APIs have been certified, totaling 66 TMF certifications. During the delivery process, we promote the use of these certified APIs for integration, leading to successful implementations such as those with Telecom Malaysia, Saudi Dawiyat, Colombia Telefonica, which demonstrate our effective deployment of ODA in real-world scenarios.

Find out more about Ready for ODA here.