TM Forum members develop code to test ODA concepts

It's not just talk. TM Forum members are creating software code in the form of a reference implementation of the Open Digital Architecture (ODA) called the Business Operating System (BOS). At TM Forum Action Week in Lisbon, executives from Orange and Vodafone discussed their reasons for championing the effort.

An effort initiated by Orange and Vodafone, and now supported by Deutsche Telekom as well, BOS aims to build a reference implementation of a portion of the ODA. It is based on TM Forum Open APIs and will provide an interoperable, real-world example of a product catalog and order capture service that members can test against.

What is the ODA?

The ODA provides a blueprint for how operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) need to be designed to support digital ecosystems and take full advantage of technology such as 5G and artificial intelligence (AI). It consists of a business architecture, called the Ecosystem Business Architecture, which describes in business terms what CSPs and their partners want to achieve, and a technical architecture that delivers best practices and information models for the underlying infrastructure architecture and data. At the center of the ODA is the core commerce management platform, and this is the focus of BOS.

Why is BOS necessary? CSPs say they need to develop BOS because they are dealing with OSS/BSS integration headaches that they have not been able to resolve.

“We need to simplify drastically,” says Laurent Leboucher, Vice President Architecture Enablers & Security, Orange Labs Services. “The only way to do that is to move to a much more plug-and-play architecture, and the only way to create that architecture is to realize it through a reference implementation.” Dr. Lester Thomas, Chief Systems Architect, Vodafone Group, agrees: “We need to collaborate at speed and adopt the approaches to collaboration that are found in the software world. BOS is not just about the speed but the practicality of that collaboration, creating something real and tangible to enable that zero-touch integration.”

BOS will give CSPs a way to check whether commercial catalog solutions comply with Open APIs, and operators could even demand interoperability tests with the reference implementation in their requests for proposal.

But it is not aimed to be a replacement for commercial catalogs. As Campbell McClean noted to vendors during his keynote presentation at Action Week: “This is not about us doing it ourselves – we still need partners. But would you not rather be building a new capability with us?”

Demonstrating BOS

Leboucher and Thomas are leading separate TM Forum Catalyst projects that will demonstrate BOS capabilities at Digital Transformation World in Nice in May. The Catalyst championed by Orange plans to show how to order a new offer and select it to start the configuration, while the Vodafone-sponsored project will focus on future 5G services, building a reference implementation of a product catalog containing 5G and edge cloud services. The learnings from these proofs of concept will help with development of the open source code.

Business Operating Systems (BOS) from TM Forum on Vimeo.

George Glass, TM Forum’s Vice President, Architecture & APIs sat down with Leboucher and Thomas at Action Week to discuss the BOS project. You can watch the full video above. If you are interested in learning more about BOS or would like to join the project, please contact George directly via wgglass@tmforum.org.