A speaker at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series (DTWS) has alleged that her talk was removed from the event’s on-demand agenda following complaints from “dinosaur” rival vendors.
In her role as Acting CEO of Totogi, TelcoDR’s Danielle Royston recorded a 15 minute talk for the DTWS event. She says that the video was subsequently made available on-demand at the event website on 28 September. Some time after, the video was removed. It is not available on the site at time of writing.
Royston alleges that it was removed following complaints from rival vendors. She told TMN that she was called by TM Forum about the video and its removal after one of her team noticed that it was no longer available on the original link. On the call she was told that other vendors had complained about the video.
Of course there may be a boring, administrative reason for the video’s removal, and TMN has asked the Forum for comment. We’ll add that as it responds. Naturally its people are busy producing live content for the event today and through the week.
You can now see the talk, titled “Avoid Vendor Lock-in With TM Forum Open APIs”, on TelcoDR’s own website here. In it, Royston tells the audience that their existing BSS “sucks – for a long list of reasons”.
In terms of directly calling out other vendors, Royston takes aim at Amdocs and at Oracle. As she castigates industry vendors for not backing up TM Forum Open APIs she says, “Amdocs… has exactly one Open API certified (D’Oh).” Totogi has 25 Open APIs certified, she points out. Both facts are verifiable on the TM Forum website here.
A still captured from Royston’s video.
A short while later, she says that the relational database model is holding the industry back and states, “You have to lose the handcuffs that the Oracle model has imposed for 30 years. To get the flexibility, simplicity, upgrade-ability and cost-effectiveness that you want, you need to dump Oracle.”
Royston was using the talk as a hook to a workshop that includes Vodafone and Orange and is being held as part of DTWS-hosted event on 7 October, and also took part in a live webinar for DTWS on Tuesday 5 October.
