TM Forum Live event set to showcase NFV, SDN and IoT advances
Advances in software technology are expected to be main talking points at the upcoming TM Forum Live event in Nice, France. Those advances include telecom operators beginning to move toward virtualization platforms as they look to drive greater efficiencies and lower costs across their networks.
The TM Forum Live event is set to include panels and discussions on customer centricity and analytics; the “Internet of Things” and related technologies; managing software-defined networking and network functions virtualization; business innovation; digital operations; and an “executive” track targeting C-level management. Those topics have become central to telecom operators as they migrate from legacy telecom platforms to more digitally focused services.
RCR Wireless News recently spoke with Nik Willets, chief digital officer at the TM Forum, about its vision for the digital business landscape. Willets noted that a lot of these technological moves already have support from the vendor community and that the biggest challenge for telecom operators is changing their mindset on what the telecom operator of the future will look like.
As part of that technological evolution, NFV and SDN are sure to garner intense interest at the event as virtualization technologies have become a hot topic among telecom operators. A number of larger carriers over the past year have announced strategic NFV and SDN plans designed to take advantage of advances in the digital space.
TM Forum late last year at its Digital Disruption event in San Jose, Calif., announced a suite of 20 new best practices and proposed standards for management of NFV and digital services as well as its latest Frameworx 14.5 suite. The work was conducted through collaboration with a number of TM Forum members as part of its Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management project.
TM Forum also released a digital services “toolkit” that it said was designed to “enable effective end-to-end connectivity” for IoT and digital services. The toolkit was put together through work with enterprise partners Apigee, BaseN, Cisco, Detecon, Ericsson, IBM, Microsoft, Orange, Verizon Telematics and ISPM.
As for the TM Forum itself, the event will be the first for newly installed President and CEO Peter Sany, who in March took over leadership of the organization from interim President and CEO Bill Ahlstrom. The organization noted the move would help further its goal of promoting the transformation of its member companies, which include a strong contingent of telecom operators, toward a digital world. Sany brings to the table C-level experience at Swiss Life, Deutsche Telekom and at pharmaceuticals company Novartis, and was a senior global executive at IBM and was also a board member of the TM Forum.
Sany will be one of the event’s keynote speakers, along with Markku Mäkeläinen, director of global operator partnerships at Facebook; Harmeen Mehta, CIO at Bharti Airtel; and Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière, EVP of innovation, marketing and technologies at Orange.
The TM Forum event is also set to host its Catalyst showcase that will include proof-of-concept projects between vendors and carriers designed to show how digital advances can impact operations. Some of the scheduled demonstrations include smart energy, smart cities and digital health, as well as a number that are centered on NFV and SDN.
Make sure to check back with RCR Wireless News during the event for full coverage, including video interviews with speakers and attendees.
