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Vodafone targets 10X improvement in operational efficiency

At the Catalyst Digital Showcase, Vodafone's Chief Systems Architect, Dr. Lester Thomas discusses the Catalyst project which is building a reference implementation for the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture.

Dawn BushausDawn Bushaus
01 Jul 2020
Vodafone targets 10X improvement in operational efficiency

Vodafone targets 10X improvement in operational efficiency

Vodafone is an avid supporter of, and participant in TM Forum’s collaborative R&D, also known as the Catalyst Program. During the opening sessions of the first-ever Catalyst Digital Showcase, the company’s Chief Systems Architect, Dr. Lester Thomas, explained why: “We're not doing this to drive an incremental improvement in our operations... We’re targeting to have a step change in how we operate our telco software. I’m talking about at least a 10 times improvement in operational efficiency through automated operations and standardization.”

Thomas believes Vodafone and other communications service providers (CSPs) can achieve this kind of radical transformation using common information and data models, such as the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open APIs. In fact, Thomas calls Vodafone’s own operations transformation, which began in 2015 as a TM Forum Catalyst project, V-ODA, short for Vodafone-ODA.
During a panel discussion to kick off the virtual Catalyst event, Thomas offered a relatable analogy to explain the importance of APIs: a restaurant server. “You need the waiter to communicate your order to the kitchen where the food is made, but you don’t need to know all the internal details of the recipe or how that food is prepared,” he explained. “The restaurant menu provides a high-level, abstract view with enough details for you to make your choice. The same is true with an API. The API takes a request and returns a response, but it does it by abstracting away all the complexity that’s happening behind the scenes… The APIs are a crowd-sourced, community-sourced set of standards that define a common language for our industry.”

‘A complete change of mindset’ at Vodafone


When Vodafone began its digital transformation journey, it was clear that it wasn’t just another project, according to Thomas. “Digital transformation isn’t a project you ever finish,” he said. “It’s a complete change of mindset.”

It requires a different organizational design and a new relationship between the IT team and business stakeholders, similar to the way hyperscale cloud providers like Amazon have structured their companies. In such companies, IT is the business.
“In an uncertain future, one of the most important things you can deliver is agility,” Thomas explained. “It’s not about the survival of the fittest; it’s survival of the most agile… We know that our future digital enabler business will operate in platform ecosystems and so open, standard APIs are really critical.”

From the outset, Thomas and Vodafone have been leaders of the Business Operating System Catalyst project, which seeks to develop a reference implementation of the ODA. Now in the second phase, the team includes China Unicom, Orange, Telenor and Vodafone as champions and Globetom, Oracle, SigScale, Tech Mahindra, Wavenet and Whale Cloud as participants.
“In the BOS Catalyst, we’re taking machine-readable API definitions a step further to build what I call machine-readable ‘envelopes’ – the standard, independently-deployable software components.” Thomas said. “And we’re also addressing the challenge of how you operate these software components.”

He elaborated: “So, we’re building a reference implementation of a standard operating environment on which these components run, because for me it’s not just about the time to market of actually deploying new software, it’s that once I have it in place, do I have something that will scale at an order of magnitude and a [lower] price point than the software that we have today?”

You can learn much more by watching the opening panel discussion featuring Thomas and the BOS Catalyst demonstration on demand. Simply register for the Catalyst Digital Showcase to access all content, on demand content is typically available a day after the streaming session: