Attaining agility and beating disruptors at their own game

Hyperscale cloud providers, over-the-top content providers and even virtual operators make being agile look easy, because for them it is. They can onboard customers and deliver applications and services on demand because they are concerned only with their own product or service on their own infrastructure, and they have an unwavering focus on it. Above all, these companies do not bear the cost of implementing and maintaining connectivity networks, nor are they encumbered by decades of legacy systems. And so far they have been subject to limited oversight from regulators. This is in sharp contrast to telcos, which are hindered by these difficulties in their ongoing efforts to become more agile and keep disruptors at bay. This report explores the drivers of and challenges to achieving this goal, and describes the key enablers that make it possible, including the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open APIs. These are critical components of the Open Digital Framework (see page 36), which also includes tools and metrics to evaluate digital maturity and tools for managing transformation of legacy systems. CSPs and their partners are working together in the TM Forum Collaboration Community and Catalyst Program to develop all these enabling assets. Read it to understand:

• What it means to be agile and why becoming agile requires cultural change
• What the ODA is, and how and why large CSPs like BT, Orange and Vodafone initiated its development
• Why CSPs believe ODA will address the long-standing challenges of interoperability, agility, intelligence and automation
• The power of disruptive platform providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure
• How ODA supports development of platform marketplaces
• What the components are of the ODA