Orange sees Open Digital Architecture as a ‘cornerstone’ of its strategy
Orange's Laurent Leboucher explains why his company has signed the newly minted Open API & Open Digital Architecture Manifesto, committing to use TM Forum’s standardized designs, definitions, software components, middleware, reference implementations and test kits.
Dawn Bushaus11 Nov 2019
Orange sees Open Digital Architecture as a ‘cornerstone’ of its strategy
The TM Forum Open Digital Architecture replaces traditional operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) architectures with an industry-agreed blueprint for zero-touch, software-defined operations. Orange is one of the first communications service providers (CSPs) to sign the newly minted Open API & Open Digital Architecture Manifesto, committing to use TM Forum’s standardized designs, definitions, software components, middleware, reference implementations and test kits. I caught up with Laurent Leboucher, VP of Customer Relation Solutions and Leading Global Architecture at Orange, to find out why his company has signed the manifesto.
Why is it important for Orange to collaborate on developing the Open Digital Architecture? Why have you signed the manifesto, and why should others join you?
ODA is a cornerstone of Orange strategy. We need a new global and modular architecture to:
We’ve long been a strong advocate of, and contributor to, the TM Forum Open APIs. We co-founded the initiative from the beginning. With this manifesto, we want to go beyond and adopt a new way of creating agile standards: Together with our peers, with our vendors and partners, we want to design, build, operate and test end-to-end reference implementations compliant with this new architecture. From that effort, we expect truly interoperable, modular, innovative and cloud-native solutions.
With ODA, we make very clear design choices such as:
With those principles in mind, we expect to reduce IT transformation costs drastically: Processes and reference data are implemented in the back-ends, and any evolution on channels and front-ends are much easier. We also expect to reduce the time needed to configure and launch new offers on all channels.
So far, we’ve learnt from past experience that poor architecture design can lead to huge costs in the long run. On the contrary, when we have the opportunity to leverage sound and concrete frameworks such as ODA and Open APIs, we can save a lot of money.
We can think of typical use cases which make Open Digital Architecture a no-brainer:
Clearly separating back-end systems (carrying processes and data) and front-end systems (for user journeys) allows a real omnichannel experience for the customer. Clearly separating Party Management in the back-end and Core Commerce Management or Production allows a unique user or customer view (a person-centric approach) for all contracts and all installed services.
Phase 1 showed that applying state-of-the-art software architectures and development methods to implement TM Forum’s models and APIs could rapidly deliver value, not only through the software artifacts that were produced and demonstrated, but also by the fruitful interactions between business owners, product owners, functional and technical architects, software developers, and integrators. It also showed the value of having integration frameworks to work easily with partners in Catalyst projects.
Phase 2 should consolidate the existing BOS Canvas, provide tangible ways to assert the compliance of solutions, and hopefully bring new actors to contribute to the components that are needed to enlarge the functional scope and usefulness of the ODA reference implementation.
Although there are still many architectural and technical challenges to reach the holy grail of autonomous smart networks, the biggest challenges may be to cope with the necessary impacts on CSPs’ processes, organizations and skills.
One of the challenges is to bring IT and network communities (design, development, operations, data experts) together to co-build a solution and make it grow, smarter and smarter over time – all the more so for a company addressing a large diversity of countries and markets (B2B, B2B2C, national B2B, international B2B). Along with the evolution of the value chains for building systems and the migration to continuous DevOps, it challenges the business and IT delivery and organization models in our group.
- Support an excellent user experience in a very rich multi-service universe
- Address the challenges of 5G network slicing
- Deploy and monetize internet of things (IoT) services
- Support edge computing
- Leverage and enable AI for services and operations
We’ve long been a strong advocate of, and contributor to, the TM Forum Open APIs. We co-founded the initiative from the beginning. With this manifesto, we want to go beyond and adopt a new way of creating agile standards: Together with our peers, with our vendors and partners, we want to design, build, operate and test end-to-end reference implementations compliant with this new architecture. From that effort, we expect truly interoperable, modular, innovative and cloud-native solutions.
Helping CSPs save on operational costs and improve time to market are important goals for the Open Digital Architecture. How does ODA help with this, and are you seeing quantifiable results from your work so far?
With ODA, we make very clear design choices such as:
- Decoupling between front-end systems and back-ends systems – front ends don’t hold any processes and just take care of user journeys, while back-end support processes are natively multichannel
- Decoupling between party management (including customer relationship management – CRM), offer and product management, and services
- Use of TM Forum Open APIs to enforce the decouplings
With those principles in mind, we expect to reduce IT transformation costs drastically: Processes and reference data are implemented in the back-ends, and any evolution on channels and front-ends are much easier. We also expect to reduce the time needed to configure and launch new offers on all channels.
So far, we’ve learnt from past experience that poor architecture design can lead to huge costs in the long run. On the contrary, when we have the opportunity to leverage sound and concrete frameworks such as ODA and Open APIs, we can save a lot of money.
How does the Open Digital Architecture help Orange improve customer experience? Have you been able to measure this?
We can think of typical use cases which make Open Digital Architecture a no-brainer:
- Multichannel (and cross-channel) seamless ordering
- Same identity for seamless multi-services
- Seamless handover between chatbot, call center and CRM
- Bundling and easy upgrades/downgrades with multi-play offers
- Moving to a new place and keep my software services (like with Netflix)
- Contextual push – for example, I’ve just landed abroad and I receive a gentle warning: “You are now roaming, please wait for a Wi-Fi connection before watching the next episode of ‘Game of Thrones’.”
Clearly separating back-end systems (carrying processes and data) and front-end systems (for user journeys) allows a real omnichannel experience for the customer. Clearly separating Party Management in the back-end and Core Commerce Management or Production allows a unique user or customer view (a person-centric approach) for all contracts and all installed services.
Orange has been a leader in the Business Operating System (BOS) Catalyst proof of concept, which aims to develop a reference implementation of ODA. What have you learned from Phase 1, and what are your plans for Phase 2?
Phase 1 showed that applying state-of-the-art software architectures and development methods to implement TM Forum’s models and APIs could rapidly deliver value, not only through the software artifacts that were produced and demonstrated, but also by the fruitful interactions between business owners, product owners, functional and technical architects, software developers, and integrators. It also showed the value of having integration frameworks to work easily with partners in Catalyst projects.
Phase 2 should consolidate the existing BOS Canvas, provide tangible ways to assert the compliance of solutions, and hopefully bring new actors to contribute to the components that are needed to enlarge the functional scope and usefulness of the ODA reference implementation.
A primary goal of the Open Digital Architecture is to enable zero-touch, autonomous networks that rely on AI and machine learning. What are the major challenges we have to overcome to reach the zero-touch goal?
Although there are still many architectural and technical challenges to reach the holy grail of autonomous smart networks, the biggest challenges may be to cope with the necessary impacts on CSPs’ processes, organizations and skills.
One of the challenges is to bring IT and network communities (design, development, operations, data experts) together to co-build a solution and make it grow, smarter and smarter over time – all the more so for a company addressing a large diversity of countries and markets (B2B, B2B2C, national B2B, international B2B). Along with the evolution of the value chains for building systems and the migration to continuous DevOps, it challenges the business and IT delivery and organization models in our group.
