Zero-touch partnering could make platform ‘utopia’ real for telcos

Communications service providers (CSPs) have been somewhat late to the platform party, but they must transform and catch up if they are to compete alongside hyperscale digital natives and keep pace with customers’ expectations. An ongoing TM Forum Catalyst project aims to help by showing how to simplify and automate onboarding of platform partners. To give customers the speed, convenience and innovation they demand, operators must be able to partner with innovative companies and startups to create mix-and-match products, services, offers and bundles – in an instant, with all of the complexity hidden. The impact on cost and time of integration between platforms and innovators is a big barrier to achieving this. Telcos typically only provide access to a limited range of companies, and even then, manual integration is required. If this is to diversify and scale, it’s clear that a single standard for partner integration is required. The TM Forum Zero-touch Partner Integration proof of concept Catalyst is tackling these challenges to enable service providers to onboard new partners instantly without any IT development work, using TM Forum Open APIs. Says Greg Tilton, CEO, DGIT (one of the companies taking part in the Catalyst):

“This is a utopia for the wholesale marketplace and an enabler of platform-based businesses for service providers so that they can become a platform for taking digital innovation and adding it to what they’ve already got and becoming a much richer value proposition for their customers.”

Competitors collaborate

The previous iteration of the Catalyst won an Outstanding Catalyst contribution award at the Digital Transformation Asia event in Kuala Lumpur in November last year, demonstrating how critical this work is to the whole telecoms industry. The first phase showed how this plug-and-play approach was technically possible using catalog APIs, demonstrating how CSPs could use a partner registry to onboard a new service that they knew nothing about, discover what they need through the catalog APIs, and then go through a complete end-to-end ordering and service management journey around those services. This first phase combined a connectivity service with a cloud network performance management service from digital innovator Sinefa. However, CSP platforms need to support services of any type, including network, internet of things (IoT), on-premise managed services (such as firewalls, switches, routers, Wi-Fi, performance measurement, deep packet inspection, mobile), virtualized network functions (VNFs), software as service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and more. Watch Tilton and Dr. Lester Thomas, Chief Systems Architect, Vodafone Group, explain the first phase of the project:

Phase 2

The next phase of the Catalyst, which will be demonstrated at Digital Transformation World in May, includes a collection of additional service types. DGIT is joined by Sigma Systems and Oracle so that three catalog-driven software products are collaborating and implementing zero-touch partnering. Tilton explains:

“We’re inviting competitors to collaborate. Our view is that this plug-and-play outcome is most easily achieved if the out-of-the-box vendors of software implement it. That way, we can show the market the value of out of the box and how these capabilities are achievable with TM Forum Open APIs, even where there are multiple vendors involved that are offering a broad range of different product or service types.” The agility can’t stop “at the edge of your software,” he adds.

The champions for this phase are BitX, BT and Vodafone Group. Catalyst Champions bring a business challenge that they need to solve, each providing a unique angle based on their geography, strategy, etc. Says Vodafone’s Thomas:

“I believe that the future role of digital service providers is building enabling services based on connectivity, including cloud and edge cloud but also IT and network applications and other services. A great example is if we could model the partnering of edge compute services.”

Champions work alongside the Catalyst participants – in this case Oracle, Sigma Systems, DGIT and Sinefa – to develop rapid-fire solutions to the specific challenge over three to six months.

Making innovation pay

In the previous iteration of the Catalyst, the team used a ‘minimum viable subset’ of Open APIs for zero-touch partnering, including Product Offering Qualification, Product Catalog Management, Product Order Management and Product Inventory Management. The team’s work extended these APIs in a number of ways, enabling the entire industry to benefit. In this phase, they will explore additional capabilities to create a full suite of zero-touch partnering Open APIs, which in effect would provide an advanced platform partnering toolkit for the industry. This work will contribute to both TM Forum’s Open API Program as well as TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) – a vision of a more agile replacement for traditional operational and business support system architectures. “Our focus is around accelerating digital innovation,” says Neil Harrington, Senior Director, SaaS Incubation, Oracle. “But here's the problem with digital innovation: The ideas flow, very fast, and there are so many ideas. But the ability to instantiate those ideas, test them out in the market and monetize them is 12 to 18 months. By that time, you have to question the relevancy of the idea.

“The zero-touch marketplace is foundational to transforming our ability to translate innovation and to monetize services.”

Update

Learn more by watching this video filmed at Digital Transformation World 2019: