More information on each of the key topic areas for your Catalyst submission:

Smart Cities
A smart city is a city that engages and connects to its citizens. There are no siloed ecosystems in a true smart city. Each ecosystem, be it smart energy, traffic management, or smart buildings all have an interdependency on the other, and very often need to share data and services to make the end-user experience smooth and efficient.
The Forum’s strategic vision for this program is to provide the business blueprint and technology architecture for scalable, sustainable Smart City IT and operations, underpinning the top 100 Smart Cities by 2020.

Smart City Catalysts will answer:
•          How to create a horizontal open data information hub?
•          How to connect disparate digital ecosystems?
•          How to drive citizen engagement and social equity?
 
Smart City specific assets and deliverables in being considered include the Smart City Frameworx Toolkit, Best Practice Guides, Maturity Assessments, a crowd-sourced open data city model and Benchmarks and Catalogs to facilitate partnerships and the development of extended smart city ecosystems.

Digital Operations Center of the Future

It’s clear virtualization is here to stay as a means of helping service providers increase agility and reduce costs. Now they are focusing on how technologies like NFV and SDN can be operationally deployed and managed to meet those business objectives.

Before large-scale rollout of services can occur, standards need to evolve naturally from a focus on functionality to development and finally to orchestration and operation.

We are now seeking Catalysts proposals which collectively demonstrate how the Operations Center of the Future Operations change to:

• Evolved operational roles that support a new operational mode which combines the best aspects of the new IT practices such as DevOps with traditional network operations;
• Require a modular architecture that is cloud-based and API-centric
• Realization through closed control loop management that is eventually automated
• Implementation using model-driven and policy-based mechanism drawing on big data analytics
• Feature tactical, short-duration horizontally layered operational processes, and strategic, long-duration vertically organized planning processes
• Enforce appropriate security

A key focus is coordinate the User Stories across participating catalysts so as to show how they support the evolving operations roles, and to understand the relative positioning of catalysts. The precise User Stories and technical capabilities will be decided collectively through discussion amongst the participating catalysts.

Internet of Everything
The Internet of Everything is the next evolution of connected world business, technology, and market solutions as innovation that enables successful partnerships and management of complex digital services that span vertical industries as the connected world of Internet of Everything (IoE) becomes the new norm for consumer and enterprise applications and services.

For Nice, IoE has been described as end to end scenarios that may include “Internet of Me (Consumer)” scenarios and  “Industrial Internet” scenarios described below:

Internet of Me 
The Internet of Me is all about personalising the Internet of Things. It involves delivering relevance into real time customer journeys based on individual choices.

With the growth of interconnectivity and increase in smart devices (phones, tablets and wearables) information can be collected and communicated to improve the lives of individuals.

We are seeking Catalysts proposals that demonstrate the Internet of Me in particular around the following:

•  Connected Home
• Digital Finance
• Connected Car
• Digital Health
• Smart Energy
• Including security and privacy, customer experience and analytics requirements

Industrial Internet 
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in manufacturing. Also known as the Industrial Internet, IIoT incorporates machine learning and big data technology, harnessing the sensor data, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and automation technologies that have existed in industrial settings for years.

The driving philosophy behind the IIoT is that smart machines provide a substantial return on investment by accurately, consistently capturing and communicating data. This data can enable companies to pick up on inefficiencies and problems sooner, saving time and money and supporting business intelligence efforts. In manufacturing specifically, IIoT holds great potential for quality control, sustainable and green practices, supply chain traceability and overall supply chain efficiency.

We are seeking Catalysts proposals that demonstrate the industrial internet of Things in particular around the following:

• Smart Cities
• Manufacturing
• M2M
• Mining
• Logistics
• Including security and privacy, customer experience and analytics requirements

Customer Experience and Analytics  
Customer experience is a key differentiator for service providers of all kinds from communications SPs to IoT providers to smart city/car/health/energy providers.  As customer expectations are elevated thanks to companies like Amazon and Uber providing outstanding experiences, providers of all kinds need to rethink every point of customer interaction and how it affects their businesses. And as service become more complex, this challenge becomes more complex as well.

We are seeking Catalysts proposals that demonstrate customer experience in particular around the topics below.  Innovation projects in new areas will also be strongly considered:

• Omnichannel
• Customer Experience for multi-party digital services
• Customer experience and data driven interactions
• Customer experience in the context of NFV/virtualization, Internet of Me and industrial internet
• Big Data Analytics  

Data analytics are becoming a core part of how businesses are run and are used in any and all functions.  The key questions today are around how to define and implement solutions that provide a good return on investment through strong business cases, rapid deployment, and streamlined operations, all while considering privacy. In addition, the myriad data that is collected from consumers, devices, sensors, etc, represents a big opportunity for monetization.  We are seeking Catalyst proposals around the topics below for any functional area (e.g. network, customer experience, marketing, services, etc).  In addition Innovation concepts will also be strongly considered.

• Showing data analytics in action for creative use cases
• Enablers for rapid, streamlined, efficient data analytics implementations
• Data monetization – making it real through best practices