Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:05):
Tony Poulos here today with Red Hat's, Chris Thornton, ecosystem Development leader, and Alexey Rusakov, who is the Senior Specialist Solutions architect at OSS and BSS and Automation. Wow. It's a very long title. Alexey. We're going to to be discussing the exciting telco innovations found in the catalyst projects here at the TM Forum Digital Transformation World Ignite right here in Copenhagen. So welcome gentlemen. Chris, let me start with you. Could you tell us a bit more about Red Hat's involvement with the Catalyst programs here?

Chris Thornton, Red Hat (00:37):
Sure. We've been involved in the Catalyst program for about four years now. All three of the events in Copenhagen. We've been working on at least two or three catalysts, which has been really good exposure for us. We started with just the basic platform proposition and opened it up to be a full innovation set of capabilities, including automation and now going through to analytics and AI type of capabilities.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (01:02):
And could you tell us more about this particular catalyst, the involving to full network autonomy?

Chris Thornton, Red Hat (01:08):
Yeah, that's a really exciting catalyst. So we've been working with our champions, which are where perhaps, excuse me for reading them because there's always a lot of them and I don't want to miss any out. Yeah. So we've been working with Telstra, e&, STC, Telin and Du, and our partners, which were Nokia, Microsoft, and Infosys and Quantel to be able to build a automation solution focused on a city, a metro area, which we've taken Abu Dhabi, where they run several different events as part of the annual calendar there. And the really exciting things is you might take something like a Formula One and people will request new capabilities. So they might want to be able to have a certain number of handheld PDA devices for retail and streaming capabilities. So we'll take the intent that's created from that and provision it, but a few months in advance, you probably want to test it.

(02:07):
Just make sure that we can meet the KPIs that are going to request for it. So we will run that in a digital twin of the network before committing to using it. And then once it's committed, we'll take it up to allow them to provision it and on the day or during the week of the event, we can then monitor those using the assurance infrastructure to make sure that it's running. And all of this runs on top of the Azure platform, but we've taken OpenShift and put it on top of there, which has allowed us to be able to take the Nokia capabilities and take it from on-premises to that Hyperscaler cloud seamlessly.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:47):
Well Chris, you've done some big name dropping in that particular catalyst. I can't remember any other bigger names coming up, but Alexey, can you tell us about your involvement in the Catalyst program showing here this year?

Alexey Rusakov, Red Hat (02:58):
Right. I was involved in the catalyst called Spatial Web Open Gateway to the immersive future. And this is somewhat unconventional catalyst in that it not only involves the TM forum APIs, but it also pulls in the camera APIs marrying the two together over the same platform. So Red Hat is providing the foundation, the OpenShift platform that is running the applications on top of it, and the API exposure piece, the gateway that actually provides the API both on TM form and Camara side. What is particularly striking here is that the catalyst is actually telling the story of decentralized marketplace where several CSPs can contribute to the common ecosystem where the aggregators on top of those CSPs provide the unified layer for application developers that can consume all the diversity of retail stores in the vicinity. But the virtual world is connected to the physical world because the spatial web is actually about the locality of things that are happening around the actual end user.

(04:13):
So you're taking the mobile phone and you are interacting with this new stack to actually find things that are happening around you. So you are looking at these stores that are not far from you. You can take goods from those stores remotely, but then fetch them at any point in time. And this decentralized world gives the new ecosystem that provides new capabilities for monetization for CSPs in the first place. So this is one of the cornerstone things that this kettles enables. This hasn't been possible before because the network capabilities needed to be exposed to the outside world, and Camara APIs have become the enabler of that. But TM Forum APIs had to evolve to support these new kind of services as well. So this is a really interesting catalyst in this regard. And that's the decentralized story is what really strikes me, where people are trying to draw the lines. This catalyst is actually building bridges across the world.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:22):
Well, Chris, I understand that Red Hat is also involved with the end-to-end autonomous service and network resource management Catalyst, which has a very long name as well. Why is this technology so important to operators at the moment?

Chris Thornton, Red Hat (05:34):
Yeah, and it's interesting. It's got a long name, but it's also got a lot of champions that participate in it. And we're working.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:40):
I knew you were going to say that.

Chris Thornton, Red Hat (05:41):
Yeah. And we're working with Telstra with Rogers T-Mobile and Deutsche Telecom. Its Axion, PLDT, BT Group and Vodafone all are committed to working on this catalyst with us. And we've taken some quite interesting capabilities, which we're looking at things like R apps and if multiple R apps are deployed, which one's going to take precedence? With the partners that we've been working with, we've built a solution that can have a ESG focus R app that's running, maintaining the operator's ESG preferences. And then when a customer demand comes in, it might choose to optimize it to the customer's requirements as opposed to the CSPs ESG guidelines. So doing that, and we've integrated it with the work that we've been doing in the O Ran alliance where we've taken the work with the O2 IMS interface and the metal three open source hardware manager and built an O Cloud layer underneath that can be linked to another event type scenario. So once an event requests infrastructure, we can automatically configure that infrastructure to be able to deploy whatever workload we need on top of that.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (07:03):
Alexey, this Catalyst program at the term forum is rather unique, and we see all these names, these big names getting together, which they wouldn't normally do to come up with Catalyst, but what's next for the Catalyst and what other topics are you going to pursue?

Alexey Rusakov, Red Hat (07:16):
Oh yeah, great question. Because in fact, what we're doing right now is we are finding more and more value in participating in the Catalyst program generally. And for example, in this particular catalyst that I participated with entity Data with Hanson Matrix Abstract, the new entrant that has been specifically around kamar APIs, we are helping the real CSPs like team Brazil and Telefonica in this particular case. So the next step is actually twofold. On the one hand, we of course are going to maintain and extend our presence in Catalyst programs because we are interested in experimenting further. And of course we will have to go into the AI domain because everybody's going there. So we will absolutely look into what we additionally can enable here. The Egen AI is coming, so we are definitely going to look in this direction as well. But on the other hand, the catalysts are great proving ground for the technology. So natural next step in this direction, of course, is to productize and operationalize the outcomes from those catalysts so that each of us could find the realization of those catalysts in real life next year, maybe even sooner. That would be the best confirmation that what we are doing right now is actually makes lots, that definitely has to be the

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (08:47):
Objective. And what about DTW Asia? Will you be there?

Chris Thornton, Red Hat (08:50):
Yeah, for sure. We've already signed up to do a couple of catalysts. We're just trying to narrow down which ones it will be

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (08:56):
Fabulous. Great to talk to you, Chris and Alex, thank you for being with me today.