• CityFibre, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telia, and Telstra latest CSPs to achieve TM Forum ‘Running on ODA’ status
• The three biggest hyperscalers—AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft launch new cloud-ready ODA Canvases
• TM Forum launches Gen5 Open APIs to underpin the evolution of ODA, calls on industry bodies to partner to break down silos

DTW23 – Ignite, Copenhagen, Denmark – TM Forum today announced a major Open Digital Architecture (ODA) milestone as five more communication service providers (CSPs)—CityFibre, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telia and Telstra—secured ‘Running on ODA’ status. ODA helps CSPs partner to build new solutions that meet evolving customer needs and reignite growth. The Forum now estimates that more than 1bn telecoms subscribers use networks ‘Running on ODA’. To enable more CSPs on their ODA journey, major TM Forum hyperscaler members including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft have built ODA Canvases. These offer a standardized cloud-native operating environment to significantly reduce the cost, complexity, and risks for CSPs deploying and operating ODA-compliant software in a multi-cloud environment.

TM Forum’s ODA provides the blueprint for a truly composable architecture for CSPs. Built on industry-agreed, modular, reusable software components and Open APIs, ODA helps CSPs transform business agility, significantly reducing costs and increasing service velocity. To achieve ‘Running on ODA’ status, CSPs have to pass a 360-degree assessment of how they are deploying an ODA-compliant, AI-ready composable architecture across their software estate.

“The industry’s commitment to ODA is clear. CSPs, hyperscalers and major software vendors are driving greater simplicity and moving towards a single, AI-driven plug-and-play future. Achieving ‘Running on ODA’ status is no easy feat – it takes solid commitment from technology teams to drive real change – spanning skills, governance, and technical innovation. It is extremely rewarding to have some of the world’s largest and most nimble CSPs achieving this status in their organizations,” said Nik Willetts, CEO of TM Forum. “We’re especially delighted that, just 20 months after starting ‘Running on ODA’ evaluations, ODA is already the target architecture for CSPs touching more than 1 billion telecoms subscribers worldwide. With many more CSPs on their way to achieving ‘Running on ODA’ status, this is a serious step forward in getting our industry fit to reignite growth.”  

The ODA Canvases built by AWS, China Mobile Cloud, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Oracle provide a standardized environment for ODA-compliant software to be deployed onto any cloud platform. The Canvas greatly simplifies IT and network operations by standardizing security, observability and other software management processes, simplifying and speeding up DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering and making it easier for CSPs and vendors to integrate software without expensive customizations.

Call to the industry

Building on the widespread adoption of its Open APIs, downloaded more than 720,000 times by developers in over 2,600 companies, TM Forum members are also leading the industry to the next generation of APIs. Today the first 20 Generation 5 (Gen5) Open APIs launch, unlocking new opportunities for the industry.

Gen5 APIs help to improve velocity and reduce technical debt, by offering a simpler developer experience, as well as in-built support for intent-based automation, paving the way for zero-touch operations driven by AI. Asynchronous versions of the APIs will support the latest event-driven architectures, delivering greater agility and efficiency for applications requiring real-time processing of large volumes of data.

Designed for extensibility, Gen5 APIs also enable more efficient industry-wide collaboration on API standards, allowing industry groups focused on specific application domains to develop their own context-specializations while maintaining alignment with TM Forum Open APIs. As part of this commitment to extensibility and collaboration, TM Forum is calling on the industry to form a partnership program with the goal of eliminating the expensive proliferation of APIs standards.

“Not all APIs are created equal, and industry organizations need a simpler, more efficient way of collaborating. The next generation of APIs need to help simplify, modernize and automate across technology silos. That requires harmonizing API standards across industry organizations, and indeed, across different industries,” said George Glass, CTO, TM Forum.

TM Forum’s DTW23 – Ignite is taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark 19^th-21^st September 2023. To find out more about TM Forum’s ODA initiative, visit the TMF Industry Showcase at DTW23 – Ignite, or visit: https://www.tmforum.org/oda/