At the TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World telco leaders talked about their vision to turn around their financial positions and better monetise network investments by becoming user-centric and partner-friendly platform businesses.
Their aim is to underpin and enable that platform capability with newly-bulked up software engineering businesses, and an operating structure that benefits from flexible and Composable IT architectures. These will be boosted by the power of AI and Gen AI to understand and act upon business intentions.
Watch Totogi’s Danielle Rios Royston talk about the power of BSS Magic
The limitations of the ODA
For the TM Forum, a key foundation of the new IT architecture is its Open Digital Architecture (ODA) – a framework of open APIs that is intended to make it much easier for Operational and Business Support Systems (OSS and BSS) to interact with each other, so that operators can construct services and offers in a much more dynamic manner.
Telco software vendors can adopt the TM Forum APIs – and be verified as having done so – giving operators confidence that they can create more modular and composable IT systems.
But as I learnt during a live event at the AWS stage at Digital Transformation World, the open API model might not go far enough to enable the new operating vision that telcos are targeting.
Danielle Rios, Acting CEO of new generation BSS company Totogi, itself a leading adopter of ODA APIs, told me during a 1-2-1 fireside chat [you can watch the video below on this page] that although the ODA is a great start, there’s still more work to do to fulfil its vision.
The promise of the ODA is that because software elements support common APIs, operators can switch out and make changes to software easily and quickly. However, Rios said that there is a remaining challenge – the way underlying data within software applications is structured can defy attempts to create a common language between systems.
“The problem is that each vendor has its own data structure, its own schema, and that makes it very difficult to have that interoperability, while ensuring that the semantical meaning of the data structure carries through.”
“The promise of ODA is the ability to switch out these components quickly, with all the integration code staying the same. But the problem is that there’s semantical meaning in that integration code. It’s great if we all use the same data structure, but all the vendors have different data structures.”
As a simple example, Rios gives the fact that one vendor might populate an account field with numbers only. An operator deploying a new vendor might find that the new vendor uses alpha-numerics.
Now, instead of that simple switch out and creating system interoperability, “everything falls apart.”
George Glass, TM Forum CTO, would agree that underlying data structure is a key issue. Talking to TMN in a network automation context, he highlighted a similar issue to the one that Rios identified.
“It’s so important to have the right data in the right format, with the right accessibility and the correct permissions to use the data. If you’ve just been building your architecture over many years using different vendors moving from network technology to network technology, everything’s structured differently. And therefore AI is constrained in its capabilities because you’re having to do effectively a translation of the data to understand what it is before you can process it. What we’re looking to do though the work we’re doing is standardise the data, standardise the access to the data or even get the device or whatever it is to actually expose the data automatically.”
The AI API
Speaking at our AWS session, Rios was in accord, and she also has a proposed solution ready, thanks to a new capability from Totogi called BSS Magic.
“The key is creating a harmonised data structure – and that’s what BSS Magic is aiming to do.”
It does that by using Generative AI to understand underlying data structure in any vendor system, and create a harmonised version.
Gen AI enables business users, rather than coders or techies, to generate code by themselves that can interact with their software systems, either for simple matters like solving a customer support ticket, or for something more complicated like generating insights and creating compelling plans.
Rios says AI can also take the next step, coding the changes required to enact that business intention, without incurring the expensive and lengthy change request system.
“As a businessperson, I want to be able to do this and simply go and make it happen. Most vendors won’t let the telcos make those changes themselves within their systems, but we put BSS Magic on top of a real deployed system and enable them to do that.”
In this sense, BSS Magic acts like an intelligent layer over different vendor software and ecosystems – the (AI)PI, as Rios terms it – and then on top of that automates the code required to enable the business user to reach their objectives.
And it goes beyond merely creating a co-pilot for existing BSS, rather it is about creating a new interface to the BSS, one that Rios describes as changing “to become invisible.”
Known as a pioneer in urging telcos to leverage the flexibility and innovation in public cloud platforms, Rios is now similarly bullish on the potential of Gen AI and AI.
“The power it will give to business users is going to be phenomenal – this is where the power of AI is really going to take off. That’s where we’re going and it’s going to be really exciting.”
Watch Totogi’s Danielle Rios Royston talk about the power of BSS Magic
LEARN MORE ABOUT TOTOGI
* This article was produced in association with a TMN partner
