Issue 26 Articles

Infonova logoDigital for Growth,
Digital for Climate

Leading up to TMF Live! where Infonova is participating in three catalysts, Andreas Polz talks about the responsibility that the communications industry has towards climate preservation and how to ensure “Digital for Climate” while simultaneously stimulating economic growth

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Andreas Polz, CTO, Infonova
Andreas Polz, CTO, Infonova

Andreas is CTO at Infonova, the global leader in transformational service provider solutions. Andreas joined Infonova in 2000, after about a decade in academic research and working for Siemens, to support multiple telecom projects on three continents for a number of clients from incumbent carriers to startup ISPs. He is leading the effort to create the Infonova BSS R6 product from the combined experiences out of these projects and taking it to cross-industry opportunities. Andreas is specialized in value fabric based digital ecosystem platforms and is working with SDOs, committed to innovation in technology and business models alike. Andreas is also a contributing member of the TM Forum Frameworx project team.

Q: At TM Forum Live, in Nice, Infonova is participating in three catalysts: ‘Smart Life’, ‘Digital Experience Platform’ and ‘Smart City’. Tell us a bit about the catalysts and who is involved in them.
A: The catalyst, ‘Smart Life: My home, my city, my planet’, is a collaboration between Orange, Infonova, NTS Retail, Esri and BaseN. Digitalization is penetrating almost every aspect of everyday life: the family, our homes, wellbeing, entertainment, work and money. Digitalization puts Operators at the heart of their customers’ lives. This catalyst demonstrates how, on one side, end-customers can easily consume smart city services like optimised parking slot allocation and smart home monitoring services, and on the other side, how operators can monetize them.

The objective of the ‘Digital Experience Platform’ catalyst is to demonstrate how Telcos can improve our users’ digital lives, giving them choice and control, via a connected ecosystem. At the heart of this catalyst, Infonova R6 is the platform that brings services from multiple providers together, and allows all the providers to monetize these services. This project is a collaboration between Telefonica, Infonova, Infosys, UXP Systems and TCS.

The ‘Smart City’ catalyst enriches the existing Smart City use-cases of Milton Keynes Data Hub with the ability to provide trusted IoT. This catalyst demonstrates new SLA-centred Data Hub capabilities to guarantee Service Level and Data Quality. With BT as the champion, the catalyst solution is a collaboration between BearingPoint and Infonova, Cloudsoft and Huawei.

Q: Infonova is helping to lead the way in Smart City initiatives. You are using the phrase ‘Smart Life’ – could you explain ‘Smart Life’ as a concept?
A: Well, let’s look at what is happening in our world:

  • there has been a 50% increase in the annual growth rate of global mobile data traffic
  • it is predicted that there will be 13 screens per household in 2022, up from « only » five in 2012
  • 25 billion connected objects will be operating around the world by 2020

Smart Life is a user-friendly concept which:

  • simplifies the usage of connected objects at home, in your city, on your planet
  • gives and aggregates information and data for a better understanding of green behaviour
  • challenges your lifestyle with communities (colleagues, friends)
  • educates your green attitude
  • helps to reduce your carbon footprint on the planet
 

Q: Through ‘Smart Life’ we are now looking at a more people-centric vision of where Smart City Technology is going in the future. What does the expression ‘my planet’ in the title of the catalyst allude to?
A: The words, ‘my planet’, express the fundamental principle behind the catalyst – how to achieve ‘Digital for Climate’ and how the communications industry can contribute to climate preservation.

Household consumption of goods and services represents a major challenge in reducing our impact on the environment, in terms of combating the greenhouse effect and moving towards a more energy and resource-efficient economy.

At TM Forum, member companies like Orange and Infonova have pushed for taking up the campaign, DigiCOPlife, as part of the initiatives of the COP21 and the program of the New Economics of Climate UN in the wake of the Paris summit. The goal: a global alliance for a better climate, a better life, and the sharing of innovation and knowledge. How? With a platform for the development of climate-related projects. By participating in this call for ideas with Imagine DigiCOPlife, we can help companies make the best decisions to limit global warming while maintaining economic growth. See http://imagine.orange.com/en/cop-21/campaign.

Q: The second catalyst you are involved with in Nice is the ‘Digital Experience Catalyst’, with Telefonica. Taking a closer look, tell us a bit more about the digital ecosystem that this catalyst has created.
A: Globally, CSP customers are turning to increasingly more digital experiences such as Airbnb and WhatsApp, and CSPs want to be part of this to make sure their customers are well served. Even though CSPs are addressing the digital space their focus is mainly on verticals, which will not be efficient or good for customers. This catalyst provides:

  • Dynamic and personalised bundling of digital and Telco services
  • Easy onboarding using single customer profile, preferences, ID across all services
  • Distributed and configurable provisioning of digital services
  • Flexible customer and user lifecycle management
  • Meaningful and relevant customer interactions using known contexts (profile, location, device and preferences)

Q: The ‘Smart City’ catalyst also seems to encompass the responsibility that the digital world has towards our environment. Tell us a bit more.
A: Our demonstration use-case is Milton Keynes, which is the fastest growing municipality in the UK. The local authorities are concerned that the transport system, energy and water infrastructure cannot sustain the rate of growth in people and businesses. Therefore, the Data Hub is being used to enable the creation of applications aimed at enabling growth with no net increase in resources, thus using digital information to optimise our existing resources, both man-made and environmental.

Q: The Infonova R6 product plays a centralised role in all three catalysts. Why is this so significant in the new Digital Economy?
A: The Digital Economy has introduced complex scenarios where multiple suppliers and partners collaborate in bi-directional, multi-level revenue chains in various B2B2x business models. The Infonova R6 principles of Partner, Orchestrate, Monetize and Grow, empower businesses to take advantage of the opportunities that the Digital Economy is providing.

Multi-partner collaboration – Infonova R6 provides a powerful business support (eco)system with a unique multi-tenant business architecture that connects multiple, independent business partners, enabling service sharing and B2B monetization between these partners. This not only enables the monetization of end-customer business relationships but also caters for sharing revenues and allocation of costs with all service providing partners on the platform.

Multi-service – Infonova R6 gives you the business flexibility to orchestrate and monetize both traditional and next generation services and products. This truly reflects the convergence of industry value chains towards value networks.

API enabled – Infonova R6 is designed along architectural principles of an Open API interconnected platform that is closely aligned with industry standards such as that of TM Forum. All of our catalysts explore this in implementations of the new API Standards for Onboarding, Privacy, Party and Service Qualification.

Infonova logoFor more information visit:
www.infonova.com

 
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