Each year, the leading consulting firm, PWC carries out a CEO survey. They ask CEOs, from a range of industries, what their most important priorities are. In telecoms, the number 1 priority on the CEOs’ to-do list was ‘reinventing the telecoms model’.
That’s a fairly significant action. But it needs to be done. To quote the PWC survey “52% of telecom CEOs said they believed their company would no longer be economically viable a decade from now if it continued on its current path, compared with 45% of all CEOs globally.”
The good news is that there are several well-known operators who have reinvented themselves as digital operators in the past two years. Several are seeing double-digit growth and an increasing percentage of their revenues are coming from new beyond connectivity digital services. This move to become a digital operator is not easy for many telcos, especially for those who have been around for years and have established processes and systems. Dealing with legacy is the biggest hurdle to overcome in any transformation.
As CSPs evolve to sell a wider range of digital services, move towards zero-touch automation and are increasingly AI-driven driven the systems that they need to support them become more complex. The legacy systems need to be updated or replaced if telcos are going to change. But transformation is tough and changing the systems that CSPs have used for years to run their businesses can be daunting. However, when it comes to BSS, thankfully there is an industry-level blueprint for transformation. TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) provides the standards that enable CSPs and vendors to change their BSS. This enables BSS to be a foundation on which the reinvention of telecoms is built, and not the legacy barrier that inhibits change.
ODA provides a new approach to BSS and Qvantel is proud to be listed in the TM Forum’s ODA Components Directory. To be listed in this directory vendors need to provide open, interoperable software components designed for plug-and-play interoperability in a standardised deployment environment (the ODA Canvas).
Central elements of ODA are TM Forum Open APIs. As CSPs increasingly work with partners in digital ecosystems the importance of Open APIs to make software integration quicker and easier is only going to increase. Qvantel is Gold Level TM Forum Open API certified and is committed to providing open and interoperable software.
ODA provides a standards-based approach to building IT systems from reusable, microservices-based software components. This provides many benefits to CSP ranging from increased agility and efficiency to increased automation to delivering the best customer experience possible. Using standard design patterns, rules, data models, deployment patterns and integration approaches can deliver increases in agility and the faster time to market that CSPs have been asking for. Open APIs also help open up a new ecosystem of partners that can develop new digital offers and provide new revenue streams.
Many of leading CSPs in the world have signed the TM Forum’s ODA manifesto and are asking vendors about their level of compliance with TM Forum Open API when issuing RFPs.
ODA is a significant industry advancement and one that is going to become increasingly important. As such, Qvantel is committed to increasing our ODA investments by improving and evolving the ODA Canvas and increasing the number of APIs we have certified. We are proud to be active in ODA.
Topias Koskimäki
Product Portfolio Manager