Winners Recognized for Innovation, Adoption and Contribution to Driving Digital Business Excellence; Winner of “Best New Catalyst” also recognized

TM FORUM LIVE!, Nice, FRANCE—May 12, 2016 : TM Forum, the global industry association for digital business, announces the winners of the 2016 Catalyst Awards. Catalysts are member-driven proof-of-concept projects – which connect communications service providers, technology suppliers, and global enterprises from a variety of industries – to develop innovative, commercially viable prototypes of new digital services and business models.

The six winning projects were selected from a record-breaking 29 Catalysts showcased at TM Forum Live! 2016, and were recognized at the Expo Theater on Wednesday, May 11. Winners were judged by TM Forum’s Strategy Committee, which oversees the effective creation and adoption of pragmatic best practices and standards to deliver value to TM Forum’s membership.

More than 90 member companies and 300 individuals participated in the 2016 Catalyst projects which spanned Open APIs, NFV/SDN, digital health, smart climate, data monetization, customer experience management, smart cities, the Internet of Everything and more.

The 2016 Catalyst Award winners are:

Most Innovative Catalyst – Technical: Awarded to the Catalyst team with the most innovative technical concept and demonstration.

• NFV Ecosystem Enabler: A well-enabled VNF package This Catalyst project provides the framework for network providers to adopt the emerging trend of virtualization within the telecommunications environment.

Champions: AT&T, China Mobile, Orange Participants: Cloudsoft, Huawei, IBM

Most Innovative Catalyst – Commercial in Smart X : Awarded to the Catalyst team with the most innovative commercial concept and demonstration in Smart X.

• Smart City: Service Level Management for Smart City Ecosystems & Trusted IoT This Catalyst project is about Smart Cities or communities with lots of data to process for the benefit of citizens and outlines that a primary concern is the security of this data and making it accessible in a consistent way in the long run. This is the third stage of a Catalyst that is already operational.

Champions: BT, NRECA, Open University Participants: Cloudsoft, Huawei, Infonova/BearingPoint

Most Innovative Catalyst – Commercial Applications in Communications Industry: Awarded to the Catalyst team with the most innovative commercial concept and demonstration in the communications industry

• New Business Models with Mobile Sponsored Data This Catalyst project addresses demands customers are making for things to be easier and simpler to do. Even with the mobile device now being the primary means of engagement by most customers, there is still some inhibition to use it for interaction with service providers because of data costs.

Champions: Orange Participants: CloudSense, Comptel, DataMi, Salesforce, Sigma

Greatest Contribution to the Evolution of TM Forum Assets : Awarded to the Catalyst team that produces or contributes the most to the evolution of TM Forum assets.

• Building Model-Driven Service Orchestration via an FMO Architecture This Catalyst project, in its second phase, continues to define orchestrator behavior through a model-driven and micro-service chaining approach. In NFVs/virtualized/VAS scenarios, the Catalyst focuses on model-driven practices including the development of necessary metadata to define orchestrator behavior, practice on micro-service chaining approach and FMO Architectures, and on definition of FMO component Interfaces.

Champions: China Mobile, OrangeParticipants: Huawei, Inspur

Greatest Adoption of TM Forum Assets: Awarded to the Catalyst team that produces the most effective implementation or proof-of-concept of a TM Forum best practice or standard, demonstrating the value of the asset and encouraging adoption.|

• DigiCOPLife: Smart Life: My City, My Home, My Planet This Catalyst project builds on the work done in the previous Connected World platform to optimize your ‘moments of life’, which means connecting customers in their home, car or the enterprise to optimize energy spend by providing an interface that will not only show what is being spent but what can saved and how.

Champions: Orange Participants: BaseN, BearingPoint/Infonova, ESRI, NTS Retail

Best New Catalyst – Awarded to the Catalyst team with the best new concept and use case.

• Smart Industrial Manufacturing: Robots-as-a-Service This Catalyst project outlines plans for end-to-end operability from factory-floor automation equipment to cloud systems completely connected through TM Forum’s REST-based Open APIs. It demonstrates dynamic interoperability pushing dynamic APIs, also being developed within the TM Forum Collaboration program.

Champions: TWI Participants: EnterpriseWeb, Infosim

“The Catalyst projects showcased at TM Forum Live! 2016 were incredibly innovative and addressed the most diverse range of topics ever in the Catalyst Program’s history, including NFV, omnichannel customer experience, smart cities, digital transformation in insurance, APIs, digital health, the IoE, sustainability, and more,” said Nik Willetts, deputy CEO, TM Forum. “These Catalysts showcase the power of co-creation and collaboration enabled by the Forum, and bring together the best of the best across a wide range of companies, industries and ecosystems. Our sincere congratulations to the winners and to all those who participated for their outstanding work.”

The full list of all 29 Catalysts along with videos, interviews, and articles can be found here.

TM Forum members interested in contributing to future Catalysts or the Forum’s broader collaboration community and programs can learn more here. The next round of Catalysts will be developed at TM Forum Action Week, taking place July 11-15, 2016 in Vancouver, Canada. A member-only event, Action Week registration is currently open.