The last few years reinforced the fundamental role that the telecommunications sector plays in connecting governments, communities and businesses – big and small – across the world. Whether it is the provision of mission-critical social services, the exchange of information, manufacturing, working from home and business continuity, there is no doubt that the telecommunications sector played and continues to play a vital part of advancing the global economy and society.
Governments, business and individuals now look to the sector for ongoing agility and expect a similar pace in innovation.
The industry at a crossroads – continue as traditional BSS/OSS or embrace new heights of agility
With the arrival of the internet and Cloud, disruption to the sector was considerable. Telecommunications players needed to rapidly embrace IT agility in ways like they had never before, with new players entering the sector and those that didn’t keep up fading away.
Today, with the advent of 5G, the Internet of Things, AI, autonomous networks, smart cities, open digital architectures, as well as connected mobility and a move towards cloud-native models and AI at scale, the role of communications services providers (CSPs) is once again at a crossroads and being rapidly redefined.
Yet rather than view this as a risk, CSPs that look upon these rapidly shifting sands as an opportunity are poised to play a pivotal role in the near future. They are embracing a far more agile approach to building software for the telecommunications industry, turning away from traditional operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS), and opening a market for standardised, cloud-native software components.
Enter Open Digital Architecture (ODA).
Accelerating next-generation connectivity
In this phase of the digital era, CSPs are under increasing demands to create products and services more rapidly and in a cost-effective way than ever before. What has emerged as a solution to ensuring long-term business agility, through the seamless interconnection of products, is ODA. This is a standardised cloud-native enterprise architecture blueprint for CSPs, vendors and system integrators to help accelerate the delivery of next-generation connectivity.
In this next wave of commerce, CSPs will need to rapidly construct and deliver new digital enterprise-grade services for communities and business ecosystems alike – quicker than ever before, in real-time and in a cost-optimised fashion. The adoption of ODA greatly helps in addressing these complex challenges.
Embracing ODA provides strategic blueprint for radically altered operational approach
All too often, when any kind of disruption or transformation materialises, the fear is that the technology investment will be aggressive. And many parties have been known to dive in without taking a strategic and holistic approach to such shifts.
We believe that wise CSPs will develop a holistic strategy to diversify their business and radically alter their operational approach. What ODA provides, when approached correctly, is the blueprint that not just CSPs but also their suppliers and SIs need to change their IT and network systems. Investing upfront in the strategy helps fast-track the creation of new and differentiated services that will improve productivity, reduce maintenance and integration costs, whilst enhancing the customer experience. In essence, this is your key to modernising your underlying infrastructure and automating your operation.
Is ODA ready for CSPs today?
TM Forum, along with a range of companies, have been working together to create this industry standard and to advance ODA’s evolution to a point where CSPs are now leveraging it.
We are proud to have been both leading and actively working in groups as a member of TM Forum to help the sector reach this point. Specifically, and next to be released into the mix, will be ODA Components and the ODA Canvas.
To unpack this, think of ODA Components as the reusable building blocks which can be used to build business solutions. They interoperate using TM Forum Open APIs and share a common data model, making simplified interoperability a reality. Components run inside the ODA Canvas, which exposes a standard set of services to all components, covering functionality such as observability, management and security. Components from multiple vendors can interoperate seamlessly in a common or distributed Canvas, delivering simplified operations and reducing total cost of ownership.
In fact, at the recent edition of Digital Transformation World, held in June in Copenhagen, TM Forum announced an ODA Component conformance program, offering certification of vendor components.
Very quickly, you can see the importance of ODA, and the benefits to be realised by embracing this technology.
Are technology partners ready?
The early adopters are up and running, and ready to support. ODA increasingly meets the technical and strategic needs of today’s CSPs in their pursuit of highly agile commercial operations.
We believe ODA could very well form a blueprint for CSPs build the structures and ecosystems that will ignite growth in the telecommunications sector and help them at the crossroads they find themselves at today.
Brian Cappellani
Chief Technology Officer, Communications and Media