TELUS awarded ‘Running on ODA’ status by TM Forum

• Open Digital Architecture a key part of achieving TELUS’ vision, reducing costs and time-to-market

London, UK – TM Forum today announced that Canadian communications technology company, TELUS, has become the first North American Communications Service Provider (CSP) to secure ‘Running on ODA’ status. Joining Axiata, Jio and Vodafone Group, TELUS is the fourth CSP to gain this recognition, meaning network architectures following TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) principles now support millions of customers worldwide.

ODA provides a blueprint to help CSPs transform into agile digital organisations, rapidly bringing new products to market at significantly reduced cost, while improving customer experience.

The ‘Running on ODA’ award recognises advancements in TELUS’ IT architecture and delivery capabilities, using cloud-native, vendor-agnostic solutions integrated by TM Forum’s industry standard Open APIs. ODA enables TELUS to deliver products and services built from reusable components to over 9 million customers.

ODA has enabled TELUS to continue delivering innovative technology solutions and revolutionise its go-to-market strategy. For example, it recently launched a new offering across all six of its go-to-market channels simultaneously at a third of the usual cost and reducing time-to-market by one third. Prior to ODA-aligned architecture, this would have involved creating two versions of a product for wireless and wireline systems and launching it sequentially over various channels.

“ODA is a fundamental component in achieving our vision of using our world-leading technology to bridge digital divides and improve human outcomes globally. By creating a standardised API marketplace, we can build platforms on top of our core communications services and enable TELUS to serve new industry verticals in healthcare, agriculture and consumer goods,” said Hesham Fahmy, Chief Information Officer, TELUS. “To do business with TELUS in the future, vendors must be ODA-compliant and contribute to its development. This will empower us to realise our goals, maintain interoperability across our infrastructure and enable us to share innovative solutions across the globe. We’re delighted to join a growing list of industry leaders leveraging ODA to better support customers and spearhead technology innovation.”

“TELUS demonstrates the business imperative of implementing ODA. It’s a critical foundation for its grand, strategic and social purpose of bridging the digital divide, while growing in industry verticals to become a platform business. ODA will enable TELUS to harness APIs on a standardised architecture and nurture an ecosystem around this,” said Nik Willetts, CEO of TM Forum. “It’s exactly this kind of commitment to architectural and cultural revolution that will grow our global industry.”

“We’ve trained and upskilled 170 team members to implement and maintain an ODA-aligned platform-based architecture and our goal is to ensure ODA runs through the fabric of our entire company. The certification validates our commitment to adopting TM Forum standards on Open APIs and the Business Capability Framework so we can bring innovative products to the market faster and more efficiently,” said Hasan Jafri, Vice-president, Platform Engineering & Common Services, TELUS. “Coupled with our trademark ArchDevOps model and adoption of agile architecture practices and Architecture as Code, we can now maintain business alignment faster, even at the level of code check-ins, and become even more efficient in our design governance practices.”

TELUS is the latest CSP to have been awarded ‘Running on ODA’ status, with another four organisations under assessment and three further organisations eligible.