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Automating frictionless trade for vertical industries

The Digital Business Marketplace Catalyst explores smarter collaboration for greener industries.

Alasdair Riggs
27 Oct 2022
Automating frictionless trade for vertical industries

Automating frictionless trade for vertical industries

As the breadth and availability of connected technology grows, so too does the confusion for vertical industries. 5G, for instance – which type is it? LTE, CBRS or eMBB, URLLC or mMTC? Simultaneously, while vertical industries are desperate to improve their customer’s experience and environmental sustainability, CSPs don’t seem to understand each industry’s complexities.

As vertical industries invest in increasingly sophisticated projects to address sustainability challenges, however, they may find that one works against the other. Fragmented development and deployment of technology undermines delivery of efforts to meet green objectives – the reality is that the current approach to delivering major digital projects drives both climate change and exposure to cyberattacks. Where all component parts in digital transformation are custom-sourced via disparate suppliers, they are invariably more expensive and bring with them complexity in upgrades, auditing, and end-to-end security.

Whether in energy, manufacturing, agriculture, shipping or elsewhere, vertical market customers need self-service selections of highly configurable, highly secure, digital enhancements. It’s now essential, therefore, to enable specialist providers to contribute their component products and services into smart bundles – which are packaged up, tailored to individual requirements, made available as whole solutions rather than individual projects, and easily manageable from a lifecycle perspective. That means they must be sold, managed and billed by one expert lead company, with an expert set of partners, each operating ‘as-a-service’ – and delivered zero-touch, secure, and managed for life with patching and versioning.

Linking value chains

This in turn requires hundreds if not thousands of partners to be able to trade frictionlessly – and that means we need a consortium marketplace based on the use of highly repeatable patterns, to overcome integration barriers and fragmented value chains. That’s the goal of the Digital Business Marketplace (DBM) Phase V Catalyst, drawing on existing TM Forum Open Digital Architecture standards and APIs. The DBM team has extended TM Forum's Open Digital Architecture (ODA) with ‘DSE’ digital services enabling ‘repeatable patterns’. This allows a frictionless business partner ecosystem which uses a federated approach – enabling business and technical rules to be maintained across partners leveraging common data models, to make a galaxy of different service options into solutions which are multi-sourced yet plug-and-play, and with much enhanced cybersecurity, too.

The benefits to customers are clear – consolidating what was many different ordering, deployment and invoicing processes into a repeatable pattern spanning all the players in the consortium, then doing the same for lifecycle support. Those gains in business efficiency means participating organizations can focus on improving customer outcomes, while reducing the need for specific human interventions or energy use. For CSPs it offers faster time-to-market through access to pre-integrated solutions, rapid bundling of cloud services and faster third-party on-boarding – while automation of order fulfilment boosts scalability. And participating providers benefit from rapid onboarding and packaging, frictionless trading and settlements, and greater customer reach.

So just as consumers now expect to select and buy just about everything via their phones, a similar self-service approach will increasingly become the norm in complex vertical markets. There are barriers of course: DBM needs to enable any organization to join easily and choose their partners on an offer-by-offer basis; almost all manual processes need to be removed; and balancing seamless rights and permissions with a secure supply chain of non-hackable devices and systems is easier said than done. But the scale of the prize – frictionless trading via millisecond decision-making at the edge, based on industry-agnostic repeatable patterns – underpins their confidence of success.

Streamlining these complexities makes compelling business and ecological sense for everyone involved. As DBM complete Phase V, they have focused on secure MEC as a second horizontal, and enabling airports to improve how they handle just about everything from security to entertainment to parking