Strength in numbers: Marketplace helps telcos collaborate to compete
The ongoing App trading marketplace Catalyst helps telcos collaborate to compete with hyperscale cloud providers. Learn more and join the team at TM Forum's Catalyst Digital Showcase on July 30 when they demonstrate their proof of concept.
Dawn Bushaus
13 Jul 2020
Strength in numbers: Marketplace helps telcos collaborate to compete
Rapid development of the platform economy, sparked by innovation from digital natives like Amazon and Google, has left communications service providers (CSPs) playing catch-up and struggling to hold on to B2B customers, but an ongoing TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept called App trading marketplace: A framework for collaboration helps telcos collaborate to compete. The marketplace, which could eventually host other apps developed as part of the TM Forum Catalyst Program, will be demonstrated live during the Catalyst Digital Showcase on July 30.
This series of Catalysts began as a result of the Digital Platform for Ecosystem Business Pioneer Project, an effort to define a common and fully interoperable marketplace reference for CSPs’ core and future business. The idea is to dramatically reduce the time it takes operators to integrate new support solutions and develop new services, from months to just days.
In the first phase of the project, the team developed a platform to decouple legacy business support system (BSS) capabilities and publish them via APIs. In addition, they built a marketplace – much like Apple or Android’s app stores – where CSPs can publish their own applications for use by other operators in non-competitive geographies.
The project’s extensive use of the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs led to an award for best use of TM Forum assets at Digital Transformation Asia in December 2019. At the event the team demonstrated seamless partner onboarding, product onboarding, configuration in a product catalog, and how end users could consume services.
Watch this video to learn more about the first phase of the project:
Realizing the concept
The idea of an ODA-based marketplace is described in detail in a new TM Forum white paper. The marketplace developed by this Catalyst team is an actualization of the concept, which CSPs can implement to increase innovation and speed time to market.
The second phase of the project adds significant complexity which will be demonstrated in a video surveillance use case that relies on software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), 5G network slicing and edge computing. This phase also features new capabilities in the marketplace including native software as a service (SaaS) offerings, such as identity management and cloud services, and other services such as 5G messaging and video ring back tone, which plays a short video on a caller’s mobile phone before the call is answered.
“In phase two, we are going a step further and bringing in vendors like IBM and Ericsson and putting their capabilities [into the marketplace] which could be used by CSPs to develop their own apps and publish them within the marketplace,” says Udaya Priyankara, Senior Expert, Telco Solutions, Axiata Digital Labs, a participant in the project.
The champions of the proof of concept who set the business challenge are Dialog and Robi Axiata, and they are supported by participants including:
• Apptium, which is providing the marketplace user interface, product catalog, order management and B2B settlement • Axiata Digital Labs, which configures applications, decouples external assets and BSS core assets to export core BSS capabilities as Open APIs, and provides facial recognition technology • Ericsson, which is providing SD-WAN connectivity and 5G slicing capabilities • Google Cloud, which hosts the marketplace and provides other software as a service such as identity management and cloud • Huawei, which is providing a charging and billing platform and the video ring back tone capability • IBM, which is delivering AI and edge computing capabilities
Video surveillance for enterprises
Over the next three years, Gartner predicts that outdoor surveillance cameras will account for 70% of the global base of IoT endpoints. In some cases, these cameras will be used in smart cities (for example, for traffic monitoring or police department surveillance), but many also will be used by enterprises to monitor offices, factories and other facilities. This is the target market for the new video surveillance capabilities.
In the demonstration, Ericsson is providing SD-WAN connectivity using private 5G network slices, which CSPs can bundle with other services. The CSP could either sell these services directly to an enterprise, or they could partner to do so, such as with an IoT company. The enterprise customer is able to order services dynamically as needed.
IBM adds multi-cloud and edge management capabilities to bring AI to the 5G network edge. “The idea is to put the AI models as close to devices as possible,” says Joel Viale, Solution Architect, IBM. This could be on the camera itself if it’s a smart device or in an edge data center close to the camera or cell tower otherwise.
“We can adjust based on quality of service or any other parameters, in a policy-driven way,” Viale explains. “To manage and bring AI to tens or hundreds of millions of connected devices, you need a highly scalable edge platform, able to automatically adjust in real time where those workloads are running.”
The advantages of processing video at the edge include faster response time, saving on bandwidth since traffic does not have to be processed in the core network, and increased privacy because the data stays local. The graphic below shows how the participants are working together.
In future phases of the project, the team would like to explore complex, dynamic pricing models for these types of services. While a simple model might be a flat subscription fee, it could be possible to price based on resources used, location, quality of service or other characteristics.
The team also would like to make the platform available to other Catalyst projects.
“We plan to suggest our marketplace to TM Forum to use as their own marketplace,” Priyankara says. “We’re proposing that it could be used to host the capabilities developed by other Catalyst projects and sell those capabilities.”
To learn more about the goals for this phase of the project, watch this video featuring Apptium’s Lydia Bode:
Dawn began her career in technology journalism in 1989 at Telephony magazine. In 1996, she joined a team of journalists to start a McGraw-Hill publication called tele.com, and in 2000, she helped a team at Ziff-Davis launch The Net Economy, where she held senior writing and editing positions. Prior to joining TM Forum, she worked as a contributing analyst for Heavy Reading.