Open Digital Architecture
The Open Digital Architecture (ODA) provides a blueprint to help CSPs transform into agile digital organizations that can rapidly bring new products and services to market while improving customer experience. Suppliers offering ‘Ready for ODA’ product lines are well equipped to support their CSP customers with solutions that comply with today’s ODA specifications and roadmap commitments linked to the architecture’s evolving standards.
Ready for ODA
Ready for ODA is a status achieved by a software product or product line, recognizing its foundation in ODA's key principles and its roadmap commitment to support ODA's evolving standards. The criteria for Ready for ODA are assessed jointly by the software provider and TM Forum's CTO office using the ODA Success Framework, a light but rigorous and evidence-based evaluation using 6 key dimensions necessary for delivering successful business outcomes with ODA: principles and rules, skills, Open APIs, components, agile governance, and process models.
In March 2024, Marand joined the exclusive group of software vendors to achieve the "Ready for ODA" status. So far, only 9 companies in the world achieved this status. We used the opportunity to ask Mr. George Glass, TM Forum's CTO, to elaborate on the meaning and importance of the ODA and RfODA status.
Interview
In your opinion, what is the unique value that Ready for ODA status brings to vendors like Marand?
[GG] By demonstrating their alignment with the TM Forum widely adopted ODA based industry standards, Marand are positioning themselves to be able to provide solutions that can easily be integrated into service providers architectures as ODA becomes the de facto reference architecture for Telecoms.
What are the benefits that CSPs can gain from working with vendors that obtained Ready for ODA status?
[GG] As CSPs deliver their business transformation based on ODA principles and patterns, they can select RfODA partners confident in the knowledge that the partners solutions will be simpler to integrate which will significantly reduce the time and cost to deliver value as well as knowing that they future proofing their architecture with components that are compatible and compliant with ODA.
Marand has recently concluded a partnership agreement with Alvatross, another Ready for ODA company. In your opinion, what could be the benefits of such partnerships for the telecoms and the industry?
[GG] This is an excellent example of the growing ODA eco-system of vendors that collaborate to ensure that their products are compatible with each other and compatible with ODA, the industries reference architecture.
Do you see a general emerging trend in the market to move from monolithic to open, modular, composable architecture? How in your opinion Ready for ODA vendors can position themselves to grasp this trend?
[GG] We are seeing members across the globe making the move to a modular, cloud native, rule & data driven, AI enabled architecture based on ODA to enable business agility, transform costs, and launch new products and services rapidly. This means that vendors who supply the components, conformant to the ODA patterns and using OpenAPIs, are in an excellent position to win new customers and grow their revenues.
Conclusion
In 2023, 60% of Marand's revenue was contributed by ODA-based components. This figure is projected to grow to 80% by the end of 2025. Alignment to the ODA principles and standards remains our top priority. ODA also serves as the main driver for our product development roadmap.