Catalyst Program

 

Analytics Big Data Repository (ABDR)

The Analytics Big Data Repository (ABDR) catalyst is all about enabling innovation – the project focuses on standardizing a structured data lake so that service providers will be able to quickly (and cheaply) implement and test new, innovative analytics ideas and services.  This Nice 2016 catalyst will be the 5th phase of the project and provides the “how to” knowledge that operators need. ABDR provides a unified data layer, accompanied by a detailed Data Dictionary blueprint, that can support multiple use cases and analytics systems while successfully addressing challenges such as: avoiding data replication, reducing ETL costs and time, saving hardware costs (storage and processing power), and shortening the time needed to implement new use cases. The use cases being used to demonstrate the ABDR Framework are solutions to real-world CSP challenges that are described in TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance (GB-941), Fraud Management (GB-954) and Customer Experience (GB-962) guidebooks.

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Article: Smooth sailing through data lakes thanks to ABDR 

Champions: China Mobile, Cox Communications, Orange, Telekom Malaysia
Participants: SAP, Amdocs, Infosys, Apptium, DigitalRoute

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Omnichannel Collaboration Experience

Omnichannel coordination capability is urgent for CSPs who want to expand and enhance the online channel. Customers increasingly complain about their cross-channel experience. To provide best match of Omni-channel service and resource to ensure the consistent and seamless customer experience, we are exploring the omnichannel customer-centric experience operation from outside-in perspective and to work out BSS-related pain point scenarios and solutions. We are distinguishing key experience features, building the value measurement metrics and developing BDA solutions. From three aspects, i.e. ROADS (Real-time On-demand, All-online, Do it yourself and Social) customer experience digitalization, agile operation and open ecosystem to help CSPs enabling digital operation transformation.

Champion: Chunghwa, NTT
Participants: Guavus, Huawei

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Customer Centric Service Assurance

This Catalyst will show how service providers who have successfully migrated from a network centric to a service centric operational model can achieve the next step: Customer Centric Service Assurance. The contribution of this project is to develop a best practice around creating a customer centric approach to service assurance based on eTOM and other TM Forum assets. This is a Catalyst that will prove out how TM Forum assets can be used in this environment.

Champion: Eir
Participants: Galileo, Monolith, Liverpool University, MICTA

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Omnishop

This Catalyst aims to:

• Achieve a seamless personalized journey for buying of any digital service from any channel whether managed by the CSP or by 3rd parties
• Bring concrete implementations of Omnichannel experience addressing the CSP’s challenges in their existing complex architecture landscape. Challenge is to minimize disruption to legacy backend while reducing time to market to roll out new capabilities and offers across multiple channels.
• Propose approach for bundling and ordering of new age services like Digital Connected home along with traditional broadband services in a dynamic partner ecosystem
• Propose digital architecture for aligning the different channels with the back end systems like product catalog, order management, customer management and apply decoupling to create a Plug & Play Digital Sales Architecture Framework

Champion: Liberty Global
Participants: Netcracker, ZIRA, Infosys, ESRI, IBM, Sigma, TMNS

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APPEX Omnichannel

The objective of this Catalyst team is to deliver an Omnichannel management framework to enhance Customer Experience across all channels. Third parties are supported with TMF APIs and an open architecture. APPEX (Adaptive, Predictive & Personalized Experience eXcellence) Omnichannel customers will benefit from a consistent user experience regardless of channel and may interrupt and resume an interaction at will, enabled by persistent customer data and smart analytics to ensure the most appropriate “next best actions” are offered. This team has developed Omnichannel management Reference Implementation based on a Customer Centric Business Architecture approach, to assist operators with the business transformation necessary for Omnichannel.

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Article: Customer support goes ‘omnichannel’ and customers will love it 

Champions: Vodafone Group
Participants: Huawei, ESRI, MACCSA, Sigma, NTS, IBM

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Big data openness for application development ecosystem

This catalyst is about big data openness and monetization, it explores the open and dynamic mechanism to help service providers to extract the value of data and to increase their business revenue. The principle concept of this catalyst is enabling the big data application ecosystem from data preparing, data exchange to app development, the catalyst provides an open and can be standardized solution to prove this mechanism and concept. Data refining(normalization, aggregation, correlation , key information identification) and Openness agility are the major innovation target of this project. It allows different parties, (in this catalyst, we have data ingestion party, data refining party, application development party) to engage in the data application ecosystem easily, and will provide online service and API configuration mechanism for enhancing agile data openness. According to ever-changing business requirement, CSPs can leverage the data value by open framework and information sharing.

Champion: STC, China Mobile
Participant: Huawei, Viavi, Guavus, Highjet, EBIstrategy

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Virtual CPE Platform in the Home

The focus of this project is the development of predictive analytics and enhanced diagnostics in a virtualized CPE (vCPE) environment to offer proactive care of residential IP services.

Monitoring of home devices and distributed virtualized functions to detect service degradation issues proactively

Collecting contextual data (trouble history, usage patterns, geographic issues) and identify service degradation signature patterns to help with predictive analytics and building a knowledge base to promote closed loop automation.

The champions would like to explore expanding the Virtualized CPE platform to support Smart Home services- assisted living, security, smart appliances etc.

The main benefit is improved customer experience, lower OPEX and agility of offering additional innovative value-adds for service providers by leveraging a vCPE platform that reduces truck rolls and uses advanced analytics/ process automation to achieve proactive care.

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Article: Virtual CPE to benefit carriers and customers

Champions: AT&T, Telecom Italia, Orange
Participants: Ericsson, Infosys, Viavi, SAS, EXFO, HDS

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Machine Learning Optimizing Omnichannel

This Catalyst will examine the use of Machine Learning Techniques in the enhancement of Next Best Actions (NBAs) in the search for true Omnichannel delivery. This will examine the movement of customers based on cluster actions and the acceptability to engage with Avatars in the search for Omnichannel excellence. The learnings from this Catalyst will be used to inform omni channel and big data analytics projects and future direction around machine learning in TM Forum in general.

Champions: AT&T, BT, Orange
Participants: Sutherland Labs, Liverpool University, MICTA, Ericsson, Knowesis

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Prescriptive geolocations analytics with sentimental tinge

Nowadays, most Communication Service Providers (CSPs) face the challenge of high-speed and high-volume data processing in order to achieve the expected business benefits, e.g. personalize customer contact in real-time or dynamically adapt network setting or even pro-actively engage with customers based on the network services they are using and the quality of service which they are receiving. The objective of this Catalyst is to enable companies to unleash the value of their data and to improve their business providing the right insight at the right time with predictive and prescriptive analysis. This Catalyst will look at bringing together geographic information and sentiment analytics (based on twitter) to create innovative approaches to prescriptive and predictive analytics and offer business a sophisticated solution to better understanding customers enabling operators to better tailor services to the needs of the individual customer. In particular this project focuses on the validation of customer emotions as being new driver for business growth

Champion: T-mobile
Participant: Pervazive, ATOS, EMC

 

Zero-Touch NaaS Leveraging LSO, SDN and NFV 

An evolving and award-winning proof-of-concept that demonstrates how to unify communications service providers’ (CSPs) digital services and network transformation agendas. The Catalyst uses a mature Carrier Ethernet use case delivered over multiple operator networks with both physical and virtualized, self-adjusting NFV functions– while fully aligning to the MEF’s Third Network vision and LSO architecture, and the TM Forum’s work on zero-touch operations and open digital ecosystem enablement.

Champions: MEF, PCCW Global
Participants: Oracle, Infovista, Juniper Networks

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Delivering Open Cloud Eco-Systems for The Digital SME

This Catalyst will focus on the specific needs of the Digital SME and how they can be empowered to meet their network, cloud and application needs for their B2B and also how they can leverage these assets to enable B2B2X business scenarios. The digital end user (i.e. the Digital SME ) will be an experienced Cloud Partner who would normally use Cloud infrastructure. The aim of this project is to understand what will attract this user to use service provider open cloud and network assets. The digital service provider (the operator) will be enabling the SME Open Cloud ecosystem and will be able manage this using ZOOM B2B2X partnering models.  To enable interoperability, innovation through crowd sourcing in the ecosystem, the project proposes API first  approach  and  will leverage and enhance  TMForum API  set.

Champion: Vodafone
Participants: Huawei, Centina, Infosys, Invercloud

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E2E ORCHESTRATION FOR SMARTER HEALTH

The digital economy is evolving and service providers constantly seeks to expand beyond their traditional services and revenue streams.  In Emergency Healthcare, their Operations management expertise, combined with Health expertise partners, results in a vertically integrated health and communication eco-system providing significantly improved lifesaving services. An efficient ecosystem that can support such services should include tools for near-real-time tracking of the required spots of attention, dynamically ensure that the required network resources are allocated and monitor their lifecycle and their quality of service.  From a technical perspective, this Catalyst will explore an architecture of comprehensive End-to-End orchestration for NFV/SDN along with the eco-systems that can support the dynamicity of resource allocation and assurance for advanced services encompassing information sources beyond traditional telecom network boundaries.

Champions: Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera
Participants: TEOCO, Netcracker, Wipro, CanGo

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Maximizing Profitability with NFV Orchestration

This Catalyst project envisions an environment in which service providers optimize operations against a range of financial and technical objectives. Policies are structured to account for these objectives when driving optimization decisions. These decisions are geared toward attaining a level of business agility not possible before, enabled by the flexibility of NFV orchestration.  This phase improves the intelligence of control systems by factoring in the financial aspects of service operation in real time. This involves new metrics, policy model extensions and optimization algorithms. The goal is to instantiate, monitor and dynamically adjust virtualized network functions to maximize their technical and financial performance.

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Article: Maximizing profitability through NFV orchestration

Champion: NTT
Participants: Ericsson, Aria Networks, Viavi, SAS, WeDo

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NFV/SDN: A fresh approach to the business of Business Data Services

NFV/SDN can provide an omni-channel and catalog-driven approach to Business Data Services, opening new market offerings while at the same time restructuring a business that historically has been best described as a series of one-off, manual, costly, swivel chair products; into a reactive, healthy, market leading business.  Go beyond traditional Business Data Services with market offerings that are catalog-driven, enabling the rapid introduction of new products.  At the same time allowing business data services to be reactive; feeding real-time metrics into the broader B/OSS allowing the best product to be delivered that maximizes margin while delivering against SLAs and KPIs.

Champion: Ziggo
Participants: Sigma, Digital Route, Dorado Software

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NFV Ecosystem Enabler: A well-enabled VNF package

The primary focus of this Catalyst project, on its first phase, is to integrate/harmonize/enhance existing standards to derive industry agreement on how virtualized network services should be packaged especially from operational and procurement aspects. The project will transform and augment NS, VNF descriptors into procurable packages, including non-functional elements to support procurement decision making, automation, and e2e operation.”

Champions: AT&T, Orange, China Mobile
Participants: Huawei, IBM, Cloudsoft

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API Simulator Platform

New generation Digital Service Providers need to be able to plug in new platforms or partners and immediately create products to compete. Services that include newer cloud, NFV and IoT components are a part of this mix. In this model, traditional access is being presented as “Network as a Service” where the service provides real time control and allows the Digital Service Provider to manage all customer interactions. Given the extensive application of Frameworx concepts in the simulator we expect that we will be able to show the applicability of both Frameworx in addition to the suitability of TM Forum APIs to these new types of services.

Champions: AT&T, Vodafone New Zealand Wholesale and FTTH Council for Asia Pacific.
Participants: DGIT, Wipro

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Future State: Virtualizing Operations

“Future State” will demonstrate a configurable and extensible model of dynamic operations that can support Carrier Virtualization today and adapt to future requirements as the industry continues to evolve. It builds on two past award-winning Catalysts – “CloudNFV” and “Dynamic APIs”. The new Future State Catalyst will demonstrate how silos and layers can be flattened into a single interoperability fabric, which connects various roles (e.g. Service Designers; Validation Team; Partners; Customers; etc.) in a “game of actors”. Instead of rigid, siloed processes, the demo will depict dynamic processes that emerge from real-time interactions of the actors. This Catalyst leverages concepts from ZOOM, DSRA and Open Digital REST APIs. It will spotlight key opportunities for the Digital Operations Center of the Future and showcase how operations roles, processes and IT support applications will change to support virtualization.

Champions: Verizon, Orange, KDDI
Participants: EnterpriseWeb, Nokia, SevOne

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NFV Service Orchestration and Lifecycle Management based on Open Source MANO

Open Source MANO (OSM) is an initiative within ETSI (The European Telecommunication Standards Institute) to develop an Open Source MANO subsystem, one of the key components of NFV, following the existing ETSI specifications and also contributing back to them. OSM aims at enabling an eco-system of Information Model compliant VNF vendors which will avoid the need for costly integrations.

This Catalyst project focuses on the service orchestration and lifecycle management aspects of OSM within a hybrid network environment. Deployed virtual network scenarios must include appropriate interfaces for management in the traditional pillars of fulfillment, assurance and billing plus give consideration to dynamic digital service lifecycle management.  For realistic alignment with service provider virtualization rollout plans, scenarios should take into account integration with existing physical functions and legacy systems.  The following specific use cases will be demonstrated:

Triggering of Network Scenario deployment from OSS

Management of  physical & virtual (hybrid) network infrastructure

Customer order triggered service orchestration in a virtual infrastructure from an existing CRM & CPQ

Champion: Telefonica
Participants: Indra, Comptel, Etiya

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SMART BPM enabling digital transformation – Wave II

Smart BPM is a concept of modernization of business process management by using process mining & process modeling techniques. Smart BPM – Wave II focuses on service assurance domain to address different features of Smart BPM such as Automated Business Process Discovery, Smart Business process validation, Smart process framework mapping, Automated Business Process Guidance & Predictive Analysis. In digital world where Technology is changing so rapidly, there is need to improve business agility and Time to Market. Smart BPM tries to address the issues of traditional business process management and deliver the solutions in quicker, accurate & intelligent way.

Champion: Orange
Participants: Tech Mahindra, Trisotech, Fluxicon

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Building Model-Driven Service Orchestration via an FMO Architecture

The Catalyst project, on its phase II, will continue on defining orchestrator behavior thru model-driven approach and micro-service chaining approach.  In NFVs/virtualized /VAS scenarios, the catalyst project is focusing on:

• Model-driven practice: Development of necessary metadata to define orchestrator behavior
• Practice on micro-service chaining approach, FMO Architectures, and on definition of FMO component Interfaces
• Understand the traffic models of different layers and build the linkage between E2E traffic and service orchestration behavior through closed-loop automation
• Dynamic inventory and topology model
• Cost model covering OPEX, CAPEX, and license

Champion: China Mobile, Orange
Participants: Huawei, Inspur, Subex

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DigiCOPLife: Smart Life : My City, My Home, My Planet 

This Catalyst will demonstrate the foundation for an agile IoT ecosystem capable of delivering a broad range of Smart Digital Services and show how different vertical domains can be interconnected into a seamless service bundle.  The IoT promises a safer, simpler and more ecofriendly lifestyle by delivering automated security and energy management solutions. Accomplishing this requires provisioning services on a single integrated platform that is easy to configure and easier to use.  This catalyst will show the activation of physical devices (energy, security, temperature control, etc) triggered automatically based on the location and movement of the customer. 

Champion: Orange
Participants: ESRI, Infonova/BearingPoint, BaseN, NTS

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Connected care anywhere

Operators and health care providers can ensure quality of care by using IoT principles to better connect patients, health care providers, insurance companies, government agencies, family and other stakeholders. This catalyst expands the scope of smart health services from care@home to following the patient to provide connected care@anywhere.

Ericsson Service Innovation ecosystem onboards partner offers and exposes in real-time the TM Forum APIs and partner APIs for the connected care@anywhere app.The features of the mobile application are delivered by BaseN and Pryv to monitor/manage the data, perform analytics, and enable long-term data collection and privacy management. Detecon supplies their healthcare solution expertise. Orange provided the privacy management expertise, and supports the use of TM Forum APIs.  Verizon provided the requirements for the App UI.

Click here to read an article on this Catalyst.

Champions:Verizon, Orange
Participants: Ericsson, BaseN, Pryv

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Smart Health: Anywhere Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Dr. Edward Currie outlines that the objective of this exciting new Catalyst is to diagnose infection remotely. The idea is using small medical test machines that connect to smartphones. By analyzing a small blood or saliva sample on the machine the data can be transferred to a medical center to be diagnosed further and advice given.

Champion: Vodafone
Participants: CepHeid, Guavus

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Digital Experience Platform

The objective of this catalyst is to demonstrate how Telco’s can participate in wider digital ecosystem, by delivering an open digital platform that allows efficient and personalised, context-aware delivery of digital engagement. It also shows how Telco’s can improve our user’s digital lives by giving them a connection as an ecosystem of life with choice & control. It brings together capabilities like Omni-channel, Distributed Order Management, User Lifecycle Management, Context Delivery Platform, Multi-tenant BSS and Cloud Integration Platform in a holistic manner to deliver personalized and context-ware customer experience across the entire user/customer life cycle.

Champion: Telefonica
Participants: Infosys, UXP Systems, TCS, Infonova

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New Business Models with Mobile SPonsored data

This Catalyst will look to demonstrate a new way to monetize mobile data in a B2B2C business model and create a trustworthy experience between digital services and their customers, leveraging the network of mobile operators. This Catalyst project will involve a scenario showing a digital service provider who wants to create a best in class digital experience with its customers. As an example, a Bank (or any other service such as an insurance, a travel agency or a merchant …) wants to incentive its customers (let’s assume consumers) to use their mobile app and do transactions instead of going to the branch, leading to high operating costs.

During the customer service session, which may involve heavy content or a video chat, all the data used will be taken care of by the digital service provider (the bank) and will not decrement the consumer data bundle.

Champions: Orange
Participants: Sigma, DataMi, Salesforce, Comptel, CloudSense

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smart city: Service Level Management for Smart City Ecosystems and Trusted IoT

This Catalyst builds on the live Smart City use-case of Milton Keynes (MK:Smart) enriching Data Hubs with the ability to provide Service Level Management and Trusted IoT. In the previous Catalyst we demonstrated how BT’s Data Hub approach enables a Smart City ecosystem to collect, trade and monetise data and data-intensive services. The open question is how a customer can trust Data Hubs and IoT to deliver information and services that meet SLAs and data quality requirements. The Catalyst will demonstrate new SLA-enabled Data Hub features to guarantee Service Level and Trust with:

• Data providers publishing and charging for their data feeds based on different Class of Service and Data Quality levels: data granularity, accuracy, timeliness etc.
• Data consumers ordering  data feeds and services trusting Data Hubs and IoT will deliver them at a guaranteed SLA.
• SLA Monitoring and accountability of SLA breaches for data consumers (remuneration) and data feed supply chain (punitive measures)
• Care for trust, privacy and security
• Data Providers offer data feeds with their Terms and Conditions and data hub ensures data consumers abide by them
• Data Providers impose privacy terms on the data feeds: who is authorised to access and on what conditions
• Trusted and reliable data hub and IoT infrastructure: highly performant, resilient and scalable data hubs and highly Secure IoT platforms

Such SLA features enable Customers gain extra value from the Data Hub because they can develop simple or more mission-critical applications trusting the Hub to deliver required service level with guarantees and security.

Champion: BT, Milton Keynes, Open University, NRECA
Participants: BearingPoint/Infonova, Cloudsoft, Huawei

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Smart Insurance – Digital Transformation in the Insurance Ecosystem

Fully customer oriented, the ecosystem is based on a platform that connects all stakeholders in the insurance business – insurance companies, brokers and their customers/devices, enabling secure, automated transactions that underpin the trust of customers and allow better risk management by insurers. The ecosystem covers complete B2B and B2B2C process management, from stakeholder and customer onboarding to claims processing.  In this catalyst, the emphasis is on ensuring the security and privacy necessary in the handling of confidential medical records and data from connected devices such as the connected car (possibly including the European emergency e-call system).

You might also like:
Article: Catalyst project looks to a smarter future for insurers and their customers 

Champion: Orange
Participants: Qualycloud, DSTL, COEOS, Premavals, Dunasys

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DigiCOPLife: OPAL, Bring the code to the data

Considering both the urgency and the business and social impact opportunities we are facing, many feel we cannot wait any longer for new tools and methods to emerge; we must come together to generate them, and embrace more open innovation and networked problem solving. One of the key enabler of the approach is to learn to provide safe access to useful data to an ecosystem of actors. The OPAL (Open Algorithms) project intends to work with organizations that are eager to leverage the power of innovative Multiple Privacy Preserving Architecture that can provide safe access to insights derived from private data sets. It will seek to find and share the best practices for telco sharing of data initially and grow beyond telco in a future iteration.

Champions: Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica
Participants: MIT, Microsoft

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Smart Industrial Manufacturing: Robots as-a-service

While Service Providers are exploring new revenue opportunities with the Industrial Internet there are significant challenges coordinating factory floor machines with Cloud-based systems and people in dynamically connected solutions. This Catalyst goes beyond the scope of traditional closed-loop SCADA implementations and narrow Machine-to-Machine (M2M) services. It will demonstrate online orders for Robot-based services, along with remote activation and configuration of robot cells using TMF REST Open Digital and DSRA APIs. The Catalyst will show the general applicability of TMF assets for new use-cases. Moreover, it presents a real-world scenario to potentially save the Manufacturing industry billions of dollars of lost capital utilization of Industrial Robots due to extended downtime for reconfiguration and preventive maintenance that results from disconnected manual processes. The Catalyst features a multi-vendor collaboration of EnterpriseWeb, InfoSim & TM Forum are teaming up with TWI & Robots.io.

Champions: TWI
Participants: EnterpriseWeb, Infosim