Ongoing Collaboration between 25 Leading Enterprises Establishes New Models and Tools to Drive Successful, Innovative and Open Digital and IoT Services  

TM FORUM LIVE! DIGITAL DISRUPTION, SAN JOSE, CALIF. — Dec. 09, 2014:  Responding to the needs of the market and its members for practical tools to support open interconnectivity and to simplify partnering, TM Forum, along with more than two dozen leading enterprises including Apigee, BaseN, Cisco, Detecon, Ericsson, IBM, Microsoft, Orange, Verizon Telematics and ISPM, have collaborated to create a first version of the Digital Services Toolkit, bringing together a number of components including a Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA), B2B2X partnering tools, REST-based management APIs and a Business API Guide.

As more and more consumers, businesses, applications and devices become connected, service providers are demanding an open ecosystem to enable multi-party services across a complex value fabric, while maintaining security, privacy and end-to-end transparency. The Digital Services Toolkit provides key guidance, models and tools for integrating ecosystems and overcoming the risks of transformation and integration projects, reducing time-to-market for new digital services to capitalize on opportunities, and removing friction across partnerships and the value fabric.

The Digital Services Toolkit is part of the Forum’s Open Digital Program, which is at the center of digital transformation efforts for service providers across multiple industries. This program advances the application of the Forum’s well-established Frameworx standards, and strives to provide members with a competitive advantage in scalable management best practices, APIs and standards by facilitating digital ecosystem collaboration with other standards bodies, industry groups and key stakeholders. The Open Digital Program consists of two core themes:

• The Open Digital Ecosystem workstream, which develops common best practices, standards and tools that enable a truly open ecosystem where new services can be delivered quickly, easily and securely using a wide range of business models and partners. Specific areas of focus include APIs (addressing scalable and reusable APIs for digital services and Internet of Things (IoT) applications), Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA) (addressing a standard reference architecture blueprint for digital services and IoT applications), and B2B2X (addressing best practices for partnerships via toolsets and guidebooks for digital services and IoT applications).
• Industry Verticals and Connected World Applications, which consist of vertical initiatives that focus on key industry applications, including Smart Energy (radically improving the efficiency of generating, managing and using energy driven by industry use cases, Smart Cities (strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework) and Digital Health (a set of health-related assets driven by stakeholder-led user epics, scenarios and use cases). Additionally, Cross Industry Applications establish a common language and blueprint for scalable, secure and successful ecosystems of connected things. Key best practices for this theme are being established in the areas of the IoT, business models, partnerships, security and privacy, standards, innovation management and data analytics.

“The IoT revolution creates huge new opportunities for market leaders in every industry, but it also creates new management challenges and sets a new pace for innovation, requiring service providers and enterprises to fundamentally transform how they operate,” said Nik Willetts, chief digital officer, TM Forum. “This iteration of our toolkit for the open digital landscape was specifically engineered to speed up such transformations and grow the value fabric of our members’ digital services.”

The Forum’s Open Digital Program is a unique cross-industry collaboration program that the helps the Forum’s diverse member companies successfully establish and maintain their competitive position as successful digital businesses. With 100+ companies participating in the program, the Forum is delivering to the industry much needed actionable guidance in the form of toolkits, APIs, best practice guides, information models, blueprints and specific TM Forum Frameworx™ enhancements.

Components within the Digital Services Toolkit include:

• The Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA) is the Forum’s proposal to enable richer, open, distributed digital collaboration with the essential tools to support increasingly demanding technical and commercial models.
• The B2B2X partnering initiative provides tools for forming and maintaining partnerships within a digital ecosystem. This extension provides the basis for best practices for identification of touch points.
• REST-based management APIs provide specifications and best practices for integrating digital ecosystems. This release also includes additional APIs focused on customer centricity (e.g. a customer management API provides a standardized mechanism for customer records account management, such as create, update, retrieve, delete and event notification).
• TR241 Frameworx Open Digital API Business Guide R14.5.0 use cases provide target user cases and templates to address the requirements of different vertical markets and application areas. The release includes Applied Frameworx for Smart Energy, which provides utilities with examples of using Frameworx best practices, blueprints, models, APIs and integration, to create a scalable set of digital services to address priority use cases. Additionally, Applied Frameworx for IoT will be available in December, providing business canvas templates that support vertical industry user stories.

“The Digital Services Toolkit is an ‘open application,’ meaning that as the connected world evolves, Forum members have a flexible set of tools to enable new digital services with less risk,” said Craig Bachmann, senior director of Open Digital and IoT, TM Forum. “This open toolkit approach leverages more than 25 years of best practices and standards, enabling efficient and standardized interaction, and helping businesses to create, evolve and manage digital services rapidly and efficiently without the need to deal with the complexity of their partners’ businesses.”

The Forum’s Open Digital efforts are on display this week at TM Forum Live! Digital Disruption 2014, taking place at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. Along with 40+ speakers participating in the IoT track, Forum members will be showcasing innovative approaches, proof of concept projects and technical solutions to IoT challenges via the Catalyst Program. These include:

• Smart Energy: Realizing the Digital Handshake featuring Hydro Québec, Birmingham City University, BC Hydro, Salzburg AG, BaseN, Infonova, Ericsson and ESRI
• Smart City: Empowering Governments to Build featuring Verizon, China Unicom, Telefonica, ESRI and ISPM
• Recipe for Digital Success featuring Microsoft, Sigma Systems, Salesforce.com and Symantec
• eHealth: Bridging the Divide featuring Verizon, Orange, Ericsson and BaseN

For those who cannot attend Digital Disruption, these Catalysts will be streamed live on Wednesday, December 10 starting at 8:30 a.m. PST / 11:30 a.m. EST / 4:30 p.m. GMT. The stream will continue throughout the morning with multiple 30-minute Catalyst demos, each of which will be followed by live Q&A. Interested parties can register for the live stream here.

To get engaged with the Forum’s Open Digital program and join the community, please visit /iot.

About TM Forum

TM Forum is a global industry association that helps its members transform and succeed in the digital economy. The collective experience and interests of our member community, comprised of more than 85,000 experts from 950+ global enterprises, service providers and technology suppliers, drives everything we do, from thought-provoking research and publications, to practical guidance, tools and best practices, hands-on events and training for business and IT leaders.

Through three key programs – Agile Business and IT, Open Digital and Customer Centricity – we provide a unique platform for our members to connect and collaborate with individuals and groups from around the world to solve key challenges and rapidly innovate to deliver new services, improve business agility, partner for success, reduce cost and risk, and enhance customer value and loyalty. To learn more about TM Forum and join our digital journey as a valued member and collaborator, please visit www.tmforum.org.

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