Perfecting the ecosystem for a Digital Business Marketplace

This third phase of the ambitious, multi-award winning Catalyst – Digital Business Marketplace – is, like the first two, built around the core premise of frictionless partnering to create platform-based, interoperable Industry 4.0 ecosystems. Importantly, the series is about figuring out how the business models work, not just the technology, because unless all the partners can make a living, the ecosystem model will fail.
The first phase showed how multiple partners can use a single platform to create a highly flexible, economically viable Digital Business Marketplace for products and services. Zero-touch orchestration (ZTO) replaced the manual provisioning of potentially millions IoT devices, while shaving 25% off the total operational cost.

Phase II showed how communication service providers (CSPs), vendors and other service providers can enable product managers from industry verticals to shape, deliver and manage smart industry 4.0 scenario offerings to their customers.

The Covid-19 pandemic has underlined that technology businesses need to digitally transform to operate in the modern world, and the acute urgency of making that leap.

The power of partnership

Under the Industry 4.0 umbrella, the Catalyst is looking at verticals from smart grid, to smart factory, smart entertainment and smart logistics. Although they are ostensibly diverse, one of the main points of the Catalyst is to show they need a common, horizontal subset of ecosystem capabilities.

The multi-faceted nature of this expanded matrix of common capabilities is reflected in the large number of companies involved in this ambitious proof of concept project, which requires a “team of teams” approach. The champions of this new phase are Agile Fractal Grid, BT, Chunghwa, Etisalat, Maxbyte, NTT and Telus.

They are joined by participants Accenture, Amazon Web Services, BearingPoint//Beyond, Digiglu, Intel, Intuitus, IoT Lab, IOTA, Mvine, R3, Salesforce, Sitetracker, Stratus, University of Surrey, Ulster University and VETRO FiberMap.

The matrix of horizontal capabilities provided collectively by the companies includes:

• Secure supply chains


• Core platform governance and management


• Settlements


• Service assurance


• Federated identity management


• Distributed ledger technology


• Network mapping


• Secure device onboarding


• 5G and fibre provisioning


• service level agreements and contracts


• software-defined networking


• network functions virtualization


• digital experience and orchestration


• ZTO


• multi-edge and cloud, and


• Industry 4.0 vertical-specific devices and services.

TM Forum Open APIs enable all the digitalized elements of the various orchestrated products and services to be assembled to suit specific needs at particular times, and ensures they are interoperable.

Do it once, replicate everywhere

Gary Bruce, Frictionless Ecosystems Research Manager at BT, says, “In the current enterprise-based approach you'd normally find that vendors have to onboard their products or services multiple times depending on the various business relationships they have with organizations.

“In this kind of scenario, you just do the onboarding once, so you have one lot of costs and anyone within the ecosystem can use your products and services, which is a great benefit for suppliers, aggregators and, ultimately, customers.”

The size of the potential market is huge. Andrew Thomson, Senior VP Digital Enablement at BearingPoint//Beyond and Distinguished Fellow, TM Forum, comments, “There are 15 million sites worldwide that warrant compute at the edge, IoT, 5G, AI and various industry control systems to enable them to function the way they need to operate in the 21st century.”

Time pressure

Bruce explains, “We’re up against the clock because companies out there are building further stovepipe solutions in the name of digitization,” which is to waste much of the potential of digitalization – it is simply making the old physical practices digital.

He adds, “They [the stovepipe solutions] might be optimized for their particular organizations but they're not optimized across the entire ecosystem. You need an ecosystem to digitize an industry because there are thousands of companies involved in IoT and Industry 4.0 around the world.

“As company products and services change on a day to day basis, you really need companies working to onboard their own products and services because they know them best. You then want the aggregators to abstract what you offer in a way that makes sense for them, because they best know their customers.”

Securing the supply chain

The big emphasis on securing the supply chain is because already there have been instances of hacking smart deployments. Thomson says, “Some very large manufacturers’ with robot enabled factories have discovered it can cost them millions to repair a factory that’s been hacked.

“In this Catalyst we are testing how to establish completely secure, very smart infrastructure across IoT, 5G and compute at the edge, enabling the Zero Touch overlay of any vertical control systems and AI, etc – and also enabling an organization’s remote sites to operate in isolation, even though previously activated from the cloud. These are very sophisticated, but very logical steps.”

The repeatable commercial efficiency and secure delivery demonstrated by the Digital Business Marketplace has profound implication for industrial IoT and the fourth industrial revolution.
The team demonstrated their project during the TM Forum Catalyst Digital Showcase in July 2020.

Now available on demand:
Watch the Catalyst team showcase their project