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5G promises $13.2 trillion in economic value by 2025, but how can communications service providers (CSPs) afford the $1 trillion it will take to build out the network? TM Forum members have some ideas.
Dawn Bushaus
Vodafone’s Lester Thomas: Standards for cloud-native software must themselves be software-defined
5G promises $13.2 trillion in economic value by 2025, but how can communications service providers (CSPs) afford the $1 trillion it will take to build out the network? TM Forum members have some ideas. “We must move to a proof-of-concept model,” Vodafone Group’s Chief Systems Architect Dr. Lester Thomas told a crowd of more than 200 telecoms professionals gathered here in Lisbon, Portugal, for TM Forum’s Action Week collaboration event. “An RFP process is not a software-defined process; it’s not a way to build these new 5G ecosystems. Our first port of call should be: can we establish a proof of concept?”
Thomas is advocating that the Forum move to a model of collaboration and development that mirrors that used by cloud-native companies like Amazon and Netflix. He and Laurent Leboucher, VP of Customer Relation Solutions and Leader of Global Architecture at Orange, are spearheading work within the Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) project to turn support architecture components into software by developing a code-based reference implementation that members can download for experimentation.
“Today, the functionality we get from software vendors is not the issue; the hell we have to go through to integrate them is,” Thomas said during a separate session focusing on the Open Digital Architecture Reference Implementation, which got its start as the Business Operating System Catalyst.
Simplification is necessary, and Thomas points to cloud-native service providers as the model for telecoms going forward: “When WhatsApp was acquired for $19 Billion in 2012, it served 420 million monthly users but only had 55 employees.” The only way this is possible is through automation.
“We can’t afford the sort of operational overheads we have today,” Thomas explained. “We need to be able to manage these services in shared platforms, leveraging our scale to drive efficiency. The components themselves need to be self-healing and be able to self-manage all the operational processes with no human input.”
He added: “We have some examples of this already. In the Open API program, the swagger standard for API definition is both human and machine readable: We have used this to completely automate some of our DevOps processes within Vodafone… We now also have a machine-readable data standard as well – as part of the schemificaiton of the Open APIs.”
As Thomas explained in detail in TM Forum’s recent report Future BSS: Say goodbye to software customization, a replacement is needed for TM Forum’s Application Framework (TAM), a systems map that captures how business capabilities are implemented in deployable, recognizable applications. The Application Framework provides a common language for CSPs and suppliers so that they can understand each other, but it is not specific enough to allow operators to swap out different pieces within their overall IT estate. “TAM wasn’t good enough to say, ‘I want to buy one of these’,” Thomas explained. “Vendors would state compliance to TAM, but you still needed to state your business requirements to get what you needed.” To adopt a new approach, he said, CSPs and their suppliers must support development of something like the Application Framework, but it must be software-defined. Orange’s Leboucher agrees. “I fully agree with @Lester_Thomas! We need to rebuild a completely new #TMForum ‘TAM’ with an open source approach to assemble software components from vendors,” Leboucher tweeted. “This is the purpose of ODA-RI [the ODA Reference Implementation].” Thomas concluded his keynote saying: “My call-out to you is to join this collaborative process. I believe the telecoms industry is at a critical junction in its history… Whether you work for a software vendor or a service provider, we need to make it our mission to apply our collective skills to drive our industry forward. Open standards and collaboration are critical to making this happen.” See our interview of Thomas at Action Week below:
