Leading service providers including Verizon, China Mobile, Orange, Vodafone, NTT, BT and AT&T championed the latest round of digital business innovations

MORRISTOWN, NJ — November 7 , 2016 —TM Forum, the global industry association for digital business, today recognizes eleven Catalyst projects for their exceptional innovation, and additionally congratulates three Catalyst projects for their award-winning efforts. Catalyst projects are member-driven proof-of-concept demonstrations focused on developing innovative, commercially viable prototypes of new digital services and business models. These projects connect diverse companies to facilitate collaboration and foster the creation of innovative solutions to pressing digital business challenges.

The eleven Catalyst projects were showcased last week at TM Forum’s Innovation InFocus conference, an event featuring dozens of leading communications service providers – including host sponsor Verizon – technology suppliers and global enterprises. The conference brought together 200 industry leaders and featured presentations from over fifty prominent industry experts, including C-level executives from Verizon, AT&T, BT and more.

The Catalysts showcased at the conference focused on driving digital business innovation in the areas of open APIs, agile operations, virtualization, the Internet of Everything, omnichannel customer centricity and more. Catalyst projects create repeatability of their innovations by both contributing to and leveraging TM Forum’s best practices and standards including Frameworx™ and Open APIs.

The Forum’s Catalyst program has grown by over 50 percent in the last year, with a total of 40 projects having been showcased at Innovation InFocus last week and at TM Forum Live! 2016 in Nice, France. In addition, six of the projects showcased at Innovation InFocus and six new projects will be exhibiting at TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore this December. In total, over 100 member companies and hundreds of individual members have engaged in the Catalyst program over the last six months.

During Innovation InFocus, three projects received awards voted for by TM Forum’s Collaboration Board Sub-Committee:

Best in Show – Enabling the Digital Services Marketplace with Onboarding Automation

• Champions: AT&T, China Mobile, Orange, Verizon
• Participants: Amdocs, Cloud Best Practices, EnterpriseWeb, Huawei, IBM, Oracle

Best Use of TM Forum Assets – Beyond sales: Hierarchical capability openness platform for better ecosystem

• Champion: China Mobile
• Participants: AsiaInfo, Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei

Best Contribution to TM Forum Assets – Model-driven service orchestration: Proving policy is the best honesty

• Champions: China Mobile, Orange
• Participants: Huawei, Inspur, ONOS

Other innovative Catalyst projects showcased at TM Forum Innovation InFocus included:

• Smart Life: My Home, My City, My Planet , championed by Orange and NTT with Amdocs, BaseN, BearingPoint / Infonova, ESRI and NTS Retail participating
• Smart Health – Connected Care @ Anywhere , championed by Verizon with Ericsson, Infosys and Instedd participating
• APPEX Omnichannel , championed by Vodafone with Apptium, ESRI and Huawei participating
• The werewolf’s dilemma: While you transform, can you fit in the same clothes? , championed by Orange with ESRI, Subex and Tel Tech participating
• Real Virtuality , championed by BT and NTT with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, TechMahindra and TierOne participating
• Do drones dream of electric sheep? , championed by Vodafone with Centina, Huawei, Infosys and Invercloud participating
• Project Lily – a lighter logical inventory , championed by Verizon with Cognizant, EXFO and Ontology participating
• Smart BPM Enabling Digital Transformation , championed by Orange with Fluxicon, TechMahindra and Trisotech participating

“With the rapid changes happening in our industry, the Catalyst program provides a valuable vehicle for service providers and technology suppliers to accelerate their efforts to create an agile, flexible and cost effective service and network environment that supports the digital economy,” said Rebecca Sendel, vice president of services and Catalysts, TM Forum. “Participants multiply their innovation and R&D dollars, getting faster and richer results than individual companies working on their own. With so many challenges on the horizon, collaboration and partnering as embodied by the Catalyst program are the key to making digital transformation a reality for TM Forum members and the industry as a whole.”