Digital Services Reference Architecture Guide R15.0.1

The Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA) is the TM Forum’s proposal to enable richer and yet open, distributed digital collaboration with the essential tools to support increasingly demanding technical and commercial models.

As more new products are assembled out of building blocks that are provided by a range of digital service providers, there is great opportunity, and growing complexity to be managed. The opportunity comes from placing a wide range of capabilities at a product designer’s fingertips. The complexity comes from the distributed nature of those very capabilities — for example, my product may rely on the performance of your building block, building blocks from a 3rd enterprise delivered over a set of network capabilities provided by yet another enterprise — a network provider.

 This digital economy needs a set of standards and functions that allow product composers to learn about these capabilities, configure and fulfill them, monitor them, understand dependencies, and execute what may be multi-dimensional commercial and revenue sharing models among end users, component service suppliers, advertisers, etc.

 The DSRA aims to make this process simple, capable and standardized to the degree necessary. To this end, our proposed DSRA will enable collaboration and product composition from a broad set of building-block services spanning multiple companies, industries, clouds, networks and devices. And it will allow this composition to be accomplished with (if desired) commercial grade quality, accountability, business models and operational efficiencies. Finally, it will be as simple as possible, maximizing “loose coupling” and minimizing impacts on existing investments. It aims to enable, not replace.