To date, 173 of the world’s leading communications service providers (CSPs) and technology ecosystem participants have signed the Open Digital Architecture Manifesto publicly demonstrating their endorsement of TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA).
The 35 CSP signatories have agreed to follow TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture as a requirement in relevant RFPs. The group of 138 leading technology partners have committed to build and market their products and capabilities in a manner consistent with the ODA component definitions and supporting the relevant Open APIs in their products.
Since their launch in 2016, the TM Forum Open APIs have successfully paved the way for the industry to design, build and operate the systems required to deliver agility, cost efficiency and customer experience enhancements. The majority of RFPs now require Open APIs, and CSPs are rapidly implementing and certifying them.
Open APIs make software integration much simpler, but on their own don’t guarantee ‘plug-and-play’ interoperability of software applications. ODA is designed to achieve this goal through standardization of the architecture and building blocks for telecoms software. By signing the ODA Manifesto, TM Forum members are committing to follow ODA’s design principles and essential standards and to support the development of ODA, specifically:
- A set of Open Digital Architecture Golden Rules – design principles for the design of modular, reusable technology capabilities;
- A common taxonomy and definition of ODA Components – the software building blocks for telecoms IT and networks, exposing their capabilities through Open APIs;
- A standardized execution environment for ODA Components (the ODA Canvas), with an open source reference implementation, to simplify the lifecycle management of software and the execution of core business processes;
- Open Digital Architecture reference implementations and Conformance Test Kits to enable zero-touch interoperability between ODA Components from different suppliers.
Business benefit
By designing, building and operating digital services using the Open Digital Architecture, including its suite of common industry Open APIs, a range of growth and efficiency opportunities are being unlocked, including:
- Greater agility across our businesses and our customers’ businesses through a flexible, modular architecture
- Significantly reduced time-to-market by following consistent design patterns, rules, data models deployment patterns and integration approaches
- Enabling digitalized customer interactions and a consistent omnichannel user experience
- Enabling agile delivery models based on cloud-native, network-as-a-service, digital infrastructure and platform-as-a-service capabilities
- Using extensible Open APIs to expose a catalog of capabilities to partners and developers through marketplaces to monetize existing capabilities, and drive innovative new products and services
- Enabling telecoms IT and network capabilities to be accessed by software developers from ecosystem partners and enterprise customers, delivering value at local and global scale, and enabling a global connectivity wholesale ecosystem
- Dramatically reducing the costs, risks and time-to-market associated with traditional point integration and lowering implementation and operating costs
- Enabling highly automated (zero-touch) operations and end-to-end management of complex services across digital ecosystems and delivering higher quality services at lower cost
The signees agree to:
- Publicly endorse and agree to follow the Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs as a foundational element of our software architecture and commitment to zero-touch interoperability and partnering.
- Contribute to the continuous evolution of the Open Digital Architecture, Open APIs and roadmap, including implementation feedback, case studies and coordinating relevant work from other organizations.
- Support development of an open source Open Digital Architecture integration canvas.
- As service providers, expect plug-and-play conformance to Open Digital Architecture component specifications and Open APIs to be supported by vendors, system integrators and our internal development teams. We will make this support a preferred requirement in all relevant RFPs in the future.
- As technology partners, build and market our products and capabilities in a manner consistent with the ODA Component definitions; and produce plug-and-play software that conforms to the relevant Open Digital Architecture Component Conformance Test Kits, including supporting the relevant Open APIs in relevant products.
- Routinely share our implementation progress by participating in anonymous TM Forum adoption assessment surveys.
- Use these Open APIs whenever appropriate in establishing new digital partnerships.
