Telus gains a new lease of telecom software life
Summary
This was the catalyst for everybody to say theyre willing to learn a new way of doing things.” And hundreds of Telus staff are now versed in the ODA way: As the operator’s vice president of platform engineering and common services, Hasan Jafri, noted in the official announcement about Telus’s new status, “We’ve trained and upskilled 170 team members to implement and maintain an ODA-aligned, platform-based architecture and our goal is to ensure ODA runs through the fabric of our entire company. The certification validates our commitment to adopting TM Forum standards on Open APIs and the Business Capability Framework, so we can bring innovative products to the market faster and more efficiently.” And the new way of doing things starts right at the beginning of each process, noted Fahmy, as the team has to take the approach that “whatever you’re building, it’s going to be reused everywhere. What happened [in the past] was that youd look at something you’re trying to build and [have a] very narrow view and only optimise it for certain things, not thinking about how it could be used elsewhere, in other verticals, in other customer channels, in a mobile app or in a web experience. And now you’re seeing emerging players that don’t try to take the whole OSS stack, but take a portion of it and do it really well… We’re starting to find these gems in the rough, and they become interesting partners that we would have previously overlooked. So the ODA architecture isn’t just there for the operators – it’s applicable and helpful to the whole ecosystem – the vendors now know that Telus has achieved ‘Running on ODA’ status, and this means they know how they can work with the operator, as that status isn’t just handed over without a detailed process, explained Andy Tiller, TM Forum’s executive VP of member products and services.