Kuala Lumpur, 14 October 2022 – Axiata Group Berhad (“Axiata” or “the Group”), one of Asia’s leading telco groups serving over 163 million subscribers , announced today that that it had been named by the TM Forum as one of the first three telcos globally to earn ‘Running on ODA’ status. This award recognises Axiata’s architectural shift to the status of an agile Digital Telco driven by its success in building a Telco Operations framework based on TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (“ODA”) standards across operating entities in multiple Asian markets.

TM Forum announced the industry leaders in ODA deployment at its Digital Transformation World 2022 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, placing Axiata, Jio and Vodafone Group in the spotlight as the first three telcos globally to achieve ODA deployment at scale.

Nik Willetts, Chief Executive Officer of TM Forum, said “The new Running on ODA mark recognises service providers who have demonstrated, through rigorous assessment, their deep expertise and ongoing commitment to the development, use and conformance to ODA. “Congratulations to the entire Axiata team on this landmark achievement, which is a clear recognition of Axiata’s global industry leadership and execution capability.”

Central to the impactful and “at-scale” implementation of ODA at Axiata, is the Group’s Software Innovation and Digital Transformation unit, ADL (“Axiata Digital Labs”). ADL, home to 1,300 digital talents located across three of Axiata’s key markets has been successful in executing Axiata’s ODA journey on an accelerated timeline, placing the Group among global leaders in the sphere of Telco Transformation. 

Having demonstrated its capabilities, ADL is well-positioned to assist Telco Groups in accelerating their digital transformation journeys. ODA provides a blueprint and common language for reusable cloudnative, vendor-agnostic solutions integrated by TM Forum’s industry-standard Open APIs, concepts which are closely aligned with the core strengths of ADL.

Anthony Rodrigo, Group Chief Information Officer of Axiata said, “By using Open APIs and ODA, supported by the execution capability of Axiata Digital Labs (ADL), Axiata has accelerated our journey towards becoming an agile, end-to-end digital service provider. Along the way, we achieved significant cost savings across the IT stack, digitisation of business processes as well as enhanced responsiveness and velocity with respect to go-to-market initiatives. Furthermore, operationalisation of this architecture has facilitated development of new ways to monetise our technology assets by opening them to developers and partners.”

TM Forum, the industry association driving digital transformation through collaboration, recently announced a series of milestones in the development and adoption of its ODA and Open APIs.  Co-created by over 1,750 professionals from more than 350 TM Forum member companies, ODA defines an industry-agreed set of reusable software building blocks for creating, managing, and securing any digital service. The goal of ODA is to transform the velocity of DevOps teams, enabling them to navigate the journey to cloud-native software to improve time to market, reduce costs and enhance customer experience and partner – at scale.

-End-

About Axiata

In pursuit of its vision to be The Next Generation Digital Champion by 2024, Axiata is a diversified telecommunications and digital conglomerate operating Digital Telcos, Digital Businesses and Infrastructure businesses across a footprint spanning ASEAN and South Asia.

The Group has controlling stakes in market-leading mobile and fixed operators in the region including ‘Celcom’ in Malaysia, ‘XL’ and ‘Link Net’ in Indonesia, ‘Dialog’ in Sri Lanka, ‘Robi’ in Bangladesh, ‘Smart’ in Cambodia and ‘Ncell’ in Nepal. Axiata’s regional digital business verticals comprise “Boost” a fintech play, and ‘ADA’, a digital analytics and AI company. ‘edotco’ is among the top 10 independent TowerCos globally, operating in nine countries to deliver telecommunications infrastructure services.

As a committed and long-term investor, the Group actively supports and drives young talent development; community outreach; as well as climate change initiatives. Axiata’s broader goal of Advancing Asia aims to piece together the best in the region in terms of innovation, connectivity and talent to drive digital inclusion and sustainable progress across our markets. Find out more at www.axiata.com

Issued By:
Corporate Communications, Axiata Group Berhad 
Axiata Corporate Headquarters, Axiata Tower,
9 Jalan Stesen Sentral 5, Kuala Lumpur Sentral.
50470 Kuala Lumpur
Email: info@axiata.com         

For media enquiries, please contact:
Chang Yan Yi
Corporate Communications
Tel: +6012-4218172
Email: yanyi.chang@axiata.com