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Member Whitepapers

Open Digital Architecture

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ODA (Open Digital Architecture)

Released: Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Updated: Wednesday, August 1, 2018.

Building on TM Forum’s rich history in leading IT and operational transformation, and on the success of our widely used suite of more than 50 REST based Open APIs, this paper explains how we are uniting the world’s leading service providers and technology suppliers to deliver a new technology architecture and a set of best practices to achieve it: an Open Digital Architecture (ODA).

Many CSP architects have contributed to the development of ODA, which sets a new vision for operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS), and a de facto standard for the design of open digital platforms. ODA embraces fresh ideas and the latest thinking, with the ambition to deliver a model- and datadriven architecture that relies on the use of metadata, microservices and a clear set of normalized APIs.

ODA offers an industry-agreed blueprint, language and set of key design principles to follow. It will provide pragmatic pathways for the journey from maintaining monolithic, legacy software solutions, towards managing nimble, cloud based capabilities that can be orchestrated using AI. It is a reference architecture that maps TM Forum’s Open APIs against technical and business platform functions.

By providing a clear statement of intent that technology suppliers can aspire to deliver, ODA is expected to streamline the procurement process for IT systems and remove friction from the supply chain. ODA will offer a standardized blueprint enabling vendors to participate in a marketplace for reusable solutions to common business challenges.