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Microservices:
Piecing together a strategy

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Microservices: Piecing together a strategy
Report author: Page 4 The big picture
Mark Newman
Chief Analyst, TM Forum
mnewman@tmforum.org
Page 7 Section 1
Senior Director, Research & Media:
Annie Turner What are microservices and how can CSPs use them?
aturner@tmforum.org

Managing Editor: Page 11 Section 2

Dawn Bushaus
dbushaus@tmforum.org Microservices and future OSS/BSS
Editor, Digital Content:
Arti Mehta Page 15 Section 3
amehta@tmforum.org
Make it happen
Content Delivery and Program Manager:
Paul Davis
pdavis@tmforum.org
Page 18 Sponsored feature
Content Delivery Coordinator:
Joia Tulloch
Amdocs
jtulloch@tmforum.org

Research & Media Sales Manager:

Mark Bridges
mbridges@tmforum.org

Director, Solutions Marketing:

Charlotte Lewis
clewis@tmforum.org

Vice President, Content, Research & Media:

Aaron Richard Earl Boasman
aboasman@tmforum.org

Advisor:
Barry Graham,
Senior Director, Agile Business & IT Program
bagraham@tmforum.org

Joann O’Brien,
Vice President, APIs & Ecosystems
jobrien@tmforum.org

Report Design:
We hope you enjoy the report and, most importantly, will find ways to use the
thePAGEDESIGN ideas, concepts and recommendations detailed within. You can send your
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3
The big picture

4
 Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy

A century ago, Henry T. Ford’s assembly line technique
of mass production revolutionized transportation,
making vehicles widely available and affordable. For 50
years after the first Model T rolled off the production
line, companies like Ford manufactured and assembled
automobiles in their own factories.
But over the last 30 to 40 years the nature of
automobile manufacturing has changed. Today’s
assembly plant represents only the final phase in the
process of manufacturing a vehicle. It is here that
components supplied by more than 4,000 outside
suppliers, including company-owned parts suppliers,
are brought together for assembly. BMW, for example,
has about 40 primary suppliers.
We can draw some interesting parallels between car
manufacturing and software development. In the past,
software companies assembled large teams of engineers
to build applications which, over a period of time, became
monolithic and unwieldy. But now, many companies are
breaking the process down into components which can
then be reassembled to deliver larger applications.
This is called a microservice architecture or
microservices. It is an approach to building, delivering
and using software that many Internet companies
have been employing for five to ten years or more.
And in the same way that specialist manufacturing of
components has resulted in better automobiles, so is
componentization helping to create better software.
How can telecoms benefit?
But what relevance do microservices have to the
telecommunications business? Although microservices
can be used in many environments, they often are
associated with cloud-native approaches, and cloud is in
its relative infancy in telecoms.

“The idea behind microservices is that, rather than building large monolithic applications,
development teams instead build apps as collections of loosely coupled services that
operate autonomously. They are a special kind of a service-orientated architecture.”

5
 Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy

In addition, CSPs have many legacy systems, processes, Read it to understand:

technologies and business models, which they have
had little incentive to change. Unless commercial and
financial prospects come under serious pressure, the
approach to technology remains evolutionary rather
than revolutionary.
But now with competition from over-the-top providers
(OTT) mounting, operators are beginning to virtualize
their networks and embrace cloud and microservice
architectures. This report looks at how they can use
microservices.
n What microservices are
n How microservices can help CSPs
n Why network virtualization isn’t enough
n Why current OSS/BSS must change in the virtualized
world
n How operators expect to use microservices to
improve OSS/BSS
n What some challenges are in adopting microservices
n What to do next

“Unless CSPs’ commercial and financial prospects come under serious pressure, the
approach to technology remains evolutionary rather than revolutionary.”

6
SECTION 1

What are microservices

and how can CSPs use them?

7
 Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy

The first companies to deploy microservice Amazon’s microservices evolution

architectures more than ten years ago were webscale
businesses like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This was
before the term microservices – or even DevOps – was
formally recognized.

Amazon is an interesting case study. If you go back to

the company’s early days (before Amazon Web Services
existed), its online retail store was a large architectural
monolith with multiple tiers and components. Product
development lifecycles slowed as the codebase grew
and each developer had to coordinate his or her
Source: Amazon
changes with everyone else’s. Put simply, it decreased
Amazon’s ability to innovate.

The company addressed this in two ways. First, it

evolved the monolithic application into a software-
orientated architecture by teasing out functional
components and wrapping them in web services
interfaces. For example, it separated out the ‘buy’
button on the Amazon website into what we now call a
microservice. These functional components were then
only able to talk to each other through web service
application program interfaces (APIs).
These changes have impacted Amazon profoundly.
Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Re:Invent
conference, Senior Product Manager Rob Brigham,
explained how the creation of small microservices
teams with complete responsibility and accountability
for the software they create impacted the overall culture
and dynamism of the company as a whole.

The second big improvement was breaking up the
central hierarchical product development teams into
much smaller “two pizza teams” (six to eight developers
– enough to eat two pizzas). Each team was then given
full ownership and accountability. Today we call this
DevOps.
“When customers ask me why Amazon is able to move
so fast, this is the answer I give them: Even though
from the outside it might look as if Amazon is a larger
organization that might have some internal overhead, Watch Amazon’s Rob Brigham
on the inside we are really structured like a bunch of discuss the evolution of
start-up teams,” Brigham said. microservices at the company

8

CSPs look to software
To many CSPs, microservices still sound like science
fiction. Few telcos today have (or have ever had) a
software culture. They typically buy IT systems (software
and services) from third-party suppliers – either
telecoms specialists or enterprise software vendors.
But for CSPs, particularly in developed markets, it’s
becoming clear that the adoption of software concepts
and architectures is inevitable. It is just a question of
when and how.
The challenge is bringing in software expertise from
outside and reorienting existing teams. In the meantime,
traditional telecoms suppliers are shifting their own
products, services and capabilities into the cloud.
Microservices architectures will be an option wherever
CSPs are seeking to embrace cloud-native solutions,
and CSPs’ networks, which account for more than 80
percent of their total capital expenditure, arguably
represent the single biggest opportunity for cloud
transformation.
“Products need to be cloud-ready or cloud-native. Cloud-native is the only
way to strike the balance between speed, agility and transformation.”
Matt Beal, Vodafone
Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy
CSPs have been focusing on the adoption of network
functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined
networking (SDN) for the past two to three years. AT&T
has been a particularly vocal proponent.
“We have an ambitious goal of virtualizing 75 percent of
our network by 2020. Containers and microservices are
key to reaching that goal,” Andre Feutsch, President and
CTO, AT&T Labs, said in a 2015 blog post.
Virtualization is not enough
But there is a growing conviction among CSPs that
virtualization may not go far enough to create the agility
required to transition into digital service providers.
Speaking at the Big Communications Event in May, Matt
Beal, Director of Innovation and Architecture, Vodafone,
argued that it is “no longer sufficient” to virtualize alone.
“That’s not where the real benefit comes,” he said.
“Products need to be cloud-ready or cloud-native.
Cloud-native is the only way to strike the balance
between speed, agility and transformation.”
9

Beal raised concerns about the speed at which vendors
are developing cloud-native solutions: “Some [vendors]
who are strong in virtualization probably think they get
to stop there, and we don’t think that’s feasible. We
think you have to follow through to cloud-native.”
Many large operator groups have set up internal
initiatives to accelerate the evolution of their network
into the cloud – for example, Vodafone’s Project
Ocean, AT&T’s Domain 2.0, Telstra’s Network 2020 and
Telefónica’s Unica. In doing so they are trying to change
their relationships with suppliers, building more of a
partnership where both sides contribute to software
development.
DIY at Telefónica
In addition to partnering with multiple suppliers (HPE,
Ericsson, Huawei) for its Unica NFV project, Telefónica
has started to take a do-it-yourself approach to network
transformation over the last 12 months.
“We have consciously tried to simplify the architecture,
and to do that we have refused to go and see a large
vendor or integrator and give them a mandate –
we’ve decided to learn by ourselves,” Patrick Lopez,
Vice President Networks Innovation, Telefónica, told
attendees at the NFV World Congress in May.
“We’ve integrated it ourselves,” Lopez said. “Our team
Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy
is composed of programmers and UX experts… All this
talk of automation, SDN and virtualization is not going
to fundamentally change the service provider part of
the industry unless the service providers get their hands
dirty. You won’t get the OpEx savings promise unless
you can program the automation yourself.”
Telefónica’s new platform architecture has a control
layer, virtualization of resources and virtual functions,
and the company is adopting a microservices
architecture and will use containers to improve
performance.
Cloud-native is key at DT
Speaking at 5G World in London in June, Deutsche
Telekom’s Vice President of Core Network and Services,
Franz Seiser, identified a cloud-native architecture as
one of the three key concepts for a 5G architecture
(the others being an ultra-dense network and network
slicing).
A modularization of network functions should be part
of this cloud-native architecture, he added, although “We need to be careful about
a proper discussion is needed about what the criteria creating a massive management
should be to design the right size of these blocks.
problem with thousands of
“We need to be careful about creating a massive microservices.”
management problem with thousands of microservices,” Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom
Seiser said.
10
SECTION 2

Microservices and
future OSS/BSS

11

Integrating NFV with existing (and future) operational
and business support systems (OSS/BSS) is a challenge
for CSPs. Indeed, NFV requires a complete rethink of
network operations.
TM Forum has been collaborating with CSPs to help
define requirements for future OSS, and it is already
clear that microservices will be central to that vision.
“We need OSS that is highly componentized, a service-
orientated architecture,” says Barry Graham, Senior
Director, Agile Business & IT, TM Forum. “Let’s take
assurance for example: Before, you had a single
platform for collecting, analyzing and reporting on data.
Microservices now breaks this down. In a microservices
architecture, you take the approach that data collection
is just data collection. It offers componentization of
functionality and processes.”
The other benefit is scalability, particularly when it
comes to realizing the 5G vision. Long-term evolution
(LTE) networks are not architected to be able to ramp
up and take down different network elements. CSPs
today “are virtualizing things that weren’t meant to be
virtualized,” according Graham, who adds that today’s
OSS simply cannot scale.
For more about 5G management
challenges, check out this article
on Inform
Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy
Comcast adopts DevOps
Operators in the content and TV business, a market
where OTT players are innovating aggressively, need
future OSS now. Consider US cable operator Comcast,
one of the world’s biggest media companies, whose
Enterprise Services Platform (ESP) powers back-
office functions including customer and sales portals,
interactive voice response (IVR) and Comcast.com.
In 2014 Comcast started transforming ESP with four
goals in mind:
reducing time to market for new services
developing elastic scalability
increasing resiliency
decomposing the monolith
Comcast started migrating the first services in 2015, but it
wasn’t until 2016 when DevOps practices were introduced
across the business that culture started to shift. The
company plans to start using microservices this year.
“We want to introduce the concept of a microservice
doing one thing and doing one thing really well,”
Christopher Tretina, Director of Common Infrastructure
Platforms at Comcast, told delegates at the SpringOne
Platform conference last July.
12

In fact, microservices are already driving some of the
newer capabilities and applications Comcast is offering
including ‘Last 9’, a remote-control feature that allows
viewers to see the last nine videos they’ve watched,
whether on demand, on the web, a linear show or
something on their DVR.
Microservices for digital experiences
While OSS needs a radical overhaul, current thinking
around BSS is more evolutionary. This is because there
are some major obstacles to moving BSS into the cloud,
such as national regulations around the storage of
personal data and the need for charging and policy
functions to be located close to the network to minimize
latency.
Nevertheless, some leading BSS suppliers are
embracing microservices for functions where privacy
and latency aren’t a problem. Amdocs, for example, is
adopting microservices for omnichannel and customer
engagement systems.
“In back-end systems where you are less likely to change
the code in high cadence, microservices are – at least
currently – not entirely warranted,” says Zeev Likwornik,
Head of the Amdocs Cloud Center of Excellence. “But
for services where there is a higher cadence of code
change – for example, a shopping cart in a digital store –
microservices can significantly boost business agility.”
Last year Oracle announced that it would gradually
Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy
rebuild its entire product portfolio using microservices,
starting with horizontal products before moving
to those focusing on specific industries. Using this
architecture, Oracle is rebuilding its Communications
portfolio and making the revamped cloud-native
products available via a software-as-a-service (SaaS)
delivery model. Netcracker, meanwhile, leverages
microservices in the cloud platform supporting its
Netcracker 12 product suite.
Large CSPs adopting first
Microservices are a fairly extreme architectural concept Watch Comcast’s Christopher
which can be used in cloud and non-cloud scenarios. Tretina and Accenture’s
However, for CSPs they are most relevant to cloud- Nigel Barnes discuss Comcast’s
native applications and represent an important part of adoption of DevOps
the digital transformation journey.
It is no coincidence that the service providers
deploying microservices (such as those referenced in
this report) are large, established operators intent on
“It is no coincidence that the service providers
deploying microservices are large, established
operators intent on becoming innovative and agile.”
13

becoming innovative and agile, and delivering customer
experience that matches webscale companies.
They have built large teams of software developers and
engineers working across IT, network and enterprise
functions. The expertise they have acquired has
resulted in moving beyond virtualization to embracing
cloud-native approaches.
In his keynote presentation at TM Forum Live! in May,
Shankar Arumugavelu, Senior Vice President and CIO,
Verizon, referenced the importance of microservices to
the company’s digital transformation. Microservices will
be used to modernize the IT stack in an effort to reduce
complexity – a process that has already resulted in the
rationalization of two thirds of its applications.
But it is worth repeating that CSPs like Verizon are still
at the early stages of this transformation. Greenfield
systems and approaches will offer an easier pathway to
cloud and microservices, but in practice legacy IT and
networks will dominate the telecoms horizon for the
foreseeable future.
Addressing the challenges
CSPs face many major challenges in deploying
microservices, a task that is difficult even for large,
established webscale companies with considerable
software expertise. Building applications as collections
of loosely coupled services that operate autonomously
requires a completely different approach to software
Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy
development compared with building large monolithic
applications.
Alex Roetter, the former Head of Engineering at
Twitter, once described it as moving from a centrally
planned economy to capitalism: It’s difficult and can
result in anarchy. When Amazon moved to DevOps and
microservices, it found that the central engineering
team which had previously been responsible for
deploying new applications to customers was unable
to service all these new microservices teams. So, the
company created a tools group and a self-service
approach to replace the central team.
More generally, moving from distributed monoliths to
true microservices can be challenging due to stodgy
culture, lack of appetite for innovation, lack of the
technical skills required and not fully understanding the
concepts.
Returning to the automobile analogy, componentization
is an inevitability because it results in better products as
a result of specialization, focus and accountability. But
in the same way that componentization has flourished
in car manufacturing because of the existence of a
relatively small number of global automotive original
equipment manufacturers who can guarantee strong,
predictable demand for car parts, so will microservice
architectures only flourish in telecoms where there is Watch Verizon’s Shankar
scale, expertise and a willingness to learn through trial Arumugavelu discuss the
and error. company’s digital transformation
14
SECTION 3

Make it happen

15

CSPs are taking their first, tentative steps into
microservices, and it is already clear they will have an
important role within network and IT environments.
All operators have been using service-orientated
architectures which provides a strong foundation for
migrating to a modular microservices architecture.
Here are some steps CSPs should take as they plan
their migration:
Be prepared for organizational changes
Embracing microservices will require
organizational changes as part of overall
restructuring and adoption of DevOps practices.
The changes will be as much about the adoption
of new business cultures and decentralization of
responsibility and accountability as the creation
of physical teams.
Work with partners
Adopting microservices will not be
straightforward – it will be a learning process for
CSPs and their suppliers. As such, it is important
to start talking with technology partners about
“Adopting microservices will not be straightforward – it
will be a learning process for CSPs and their suppliers.”
Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy
their approaches to microservices and, where
possible, work with them on a componentized
approach. Successful partnerships will give you
confidence to roll out microservices more broadly
across your organization.
Be realistic and pragmatic
There is a risk that an overambitious microservices
project – and the breaking down of an application
into hundreds of pieces – will create a management
and organizational headache. It might be easier, in
the short to medium term, to create larger building
blocks.
Build a microservices approach into the 5G core
It seems inevitable that microservices will play an
important role in the 5G core. However, there are
still many visions about how to implement 5G, and
until consensus emerges the precise nature of the
required ‘building blocks’ will remain undefined.
Standards body 3GPP will start work on Release
16, which will address the 5G core, in mid-2018
with a target completion at the end of 2019.
16
 Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy

Consider microservices for BSS transformation

Front-end systems with changing requirements,
such as digital stores, are particularly well-
suited to a componentized approach. Adoption
of microservices in BSS can protect expensive
customization and major upgrades of
commercial off-the-shelf packages. It can enable
decoupling of ‘systems of engagement’ and
‘systems of records’, and help CSPs differentiate
service offerings.

Consider using Frameworx and Open APIs

A microservices architecture relies on APIs to
make one microservice available to another
within an application. TM Forum offers a suite of
Open APIs mapped to the Frameworx Business
Process and Information Frameworks (eTOM and
SID), which could be relevant to CSPs in their
approach to microservices. TM Forum is also
working on a functional decomposition of the
application map in the Application Framework
(TAM). For more information, contact Joann
O’Brien, Vice President, APIs and Ecosystems.

17
SPONSORED FEATURE
Putting Microservices into Practice
Taking microservices from theory into reality to achieve business agility
Zeev Likwornik, Cloud Product Line Manager & Head of Cloud Center of Excellence, Amdocs
Yifat Kafkafi, Cloud Product Marketing Manager, Amdocs
Where exactly are Communications Service Providers
(CSPs) headed in the future? Digital transformation
is top of mind for virtually all CSP leaders, as they
seek to transform their business models, IT systems
and cultures to succeed in today’s market. To stay
competitive, CSPs must improve their end users’
digital experience and gain service agility so that they
can launch and iterate new features and services
easily and quickly, with low cost of failure. This
encompasses everything from catching a market
trend while it’s hot and monetizing it (i.e. offering a
zero rated Pokemon Go mobile package) to quickly
adding new features at lightning speed, such as
adding a ‘save for later’ feature to the shopping cart.
However, CSPs face roadblocks in their quest to
transform due to the complexity of their existing IT
systems and the lengthy time required to launch
new services. Cloud native applications, based on
microservices architecture, are regarded as a key
enabler to deliver the agility and flexibility CSPs
require.
With microservices architecture you can ‘think big,
by thinking small.’ Microservices are small, single-
purpose pieces of code which form loosely coupled
pieces of applications that can be reconfigured
and assembled quickly for rapid deployment and
updates. New functions can often be delivered
through replacement and reconfiguration, rather
than intrusive and costly customizations. Individual
microservices can be seamlessly upgraded, swapped
out and scaled out/in, without affecting the rest of
the application. This allows small development teams
to work on independent modules, taking end-to-end
ownership until production. This fuels faster cycles of
innovation and experimentation – thus achieving the
full potential of DevOps practices.
In decomposing monolithic applications to
microservices using Domain Driven Design,
application functionality is divided into autonomous
domains and sub-domains with clear and self-
contained boundaries, each exposing open
standardized APIs. This modularity in the functional
architecture provides CSPs the ability to decouple
their digital applications from the back-end engines to
increase service agility and business flexibility.
Be ready for a new paradigm
The move to microservices architecture is a paradigm
shift which, if done right, holds the potential for CSPs
to boost their business agility to a whole new level. This
new paradigm encompasses a number of aspects:
18
1. Focusing on culture and processes: Beyond tools
and technology, building a culture and processes
that encourage experimentation and innovation is
key.
2. Evolving monolithic applications into granular,
API-driven applications: This shift isn’t a
simple code re-factoring, it requires intimate
understanding of Domain Driven Design and the
relevant application and business processes.
3. Embracing cloud native technologies: Selecting
the right future-proof stack among the rapidly
evolving options is critical.
4. Re-thinking your deployment processes in a
DevOps world: Will your teams be ready to
receive new features and code every few days or
weeks from vendors? Receiving code on a more
frequent basis also requires trusting vendors’
quality assurance and their understanding of your
overall business requirements and constraints.
Bridge the gap to microservices
Moving to microservices architecture is a complex
undertaking involving risks and challenges. One
of the benefits of microservices architecture is
greater simplicity in the functional domain, however
in parallel the complexity in the non-functional
domain significantly increases. The distributed
SPONSORED FEATURE

Putting Microservices into Practice

Taking microservices from theory into reality to achieve business agility

nature of microservices architecture results in higher What Amdocs offers and use standardized, open APIs. To ensure
operational complexity in many aspects such as enterprise-readiness, faster time to market and
testing, integration, monitoring, logging, security, n Microservices-based applications: After first reduced risk, Amdocs provides microservices with
service discovery and data consistency. adopting microservices in its cloud native well-defined and tested business process flows,
NFV suite, Amdocs is now evolving its digital architected for data consistency and tested to
To mitigate the impact of increased complexity and engagement and experience solutions, including ensure non-functional SLAs and performance.
ensure that business value is gained, rather than lost: care, commerce and catalog, using microservices
architecture to provide an open, modular digital Amdocs also offers technology enablers and
1. Adopt a DevOps approach for development and platform. Amdocs microservices are based on professional services to ease the path to leveraging
operation of applications: Introducing greater domain-driven design aligned with the TM Forum microservices:
automation and restructuring siloed teams to
multi-functional teams will enable managing the Amdocs Portfolio Architecture
more complex operations of microservices-based
applications and handling more frequent releases
from vendors.
2. Carefully prioritize which applications to evolve
first to microservices: Prioritize applications that
require the highest cadence of code change and
re-use for maximum business agility: systems of
engagement such as commerce, care, ordering and
catalog, as well as the NFV domain.
3. Equip your organization: Plan for training and
gradual re-skilling of your operations workforce.
4. Prepare for the bimodal transition period: Over
the next few years, CSPs will need to manage new
microservices-based applications alongside their
existing traditional applications and ensure future
and backwards compatibility.

19
SPONSORED FEATURE
Putting Microservices into Practice
Taking microservices from theory into reality to achieve business agility
n Microservices orchestration and operations
platform: Based on leading open-source community
tooling including Kubernetes and Docker, Amdocs
Microservices360 framework provides a certified
operational envelope for cloud native microservices
packaging, configuration, runtime and day-to-day
operations. The Microservices360 framework
ensures operability for CSPs with a set of tools
such as service discovery, security, monitoring,
logging, configuration, data management and
API management, while also ensuring openness
Amdocs Microservices360 Frameworks
through an infrastructure-agnostic approach that
enables microservices to be run over any cloud
infrastructure.
n Consultancy & advisory services: Amdocs assists
CSPs in building and executing their strategy for
migrating to cloud and microservices architecture,
including roadmap definition and conducting
internal training.
n Migration services: Amdocs migration services take
the pain out of modernizing legacy applications
by re-architecting to cloud-native application
20
and microservices architecture paradigms, as
well as integrating and leveraging various cloud
infrastructures.
n Managed services: Amdocs provides end-to-
end management and operations of CSPs cloud
environments and microservices applications to
support today’s bimodal IT needs. Managed services
is an effective way for CSPs to obtain both the
greater agility and cost optimization they require,
without being constrained by skill scarcity.
Today, microservices architecture is being used at
scale primarily by technology-driven innovators such
as Netflix, Airbnb and Google, who have been early
adopters of cloud technologies and DevOps. Most
CSPs are still in the process of adopting cloud and
evolving to agile methods and DevOps, and naturally
will have to bridge wider gaps in order to embrace
microservices. As these are still early days for
microservices and cloud native adoption by CSPs and
standards are still evolving, it is critical to choose the
right partner. With Amdocs’ deep industry-specific
expertise in developing and operating both traditional
applications as well microservices, we’re helping CSPs
to bridge those gaps and successfully navigate their
journey.
Amdocs Cloud Center of Excellence assists leading
CSPs in building their cloud and microservices
roadmap. Contact us at: cloud@amdocs.com

TM Forum Toolkit for microservices
AGILE & VIRTUALIZED
OSS/BSS FUTURES ARCHITECTURE
This exploratory report provides initial
steps toward the required architecture
for the Future Mode of Operations, which
incorporates virtualization and software-
defined networking with current networking
architectures.
DYNAMIC CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR
MANAGING A VIRTUALIZED ECOSYSTEM
This information guide presents some
practical closed-loop use cases as presented
in TM Forum Catalyst proof-of-concept
projects.
BUSINESS RATIONALE AND TECHNICAL
OVERVIEW FOR ORCHESTRATION AND
AUTONOMIC CONTROL LOOPS
This information guide proposes an
architecture based on orchestration
accomplished through a federation of
domains and autonomic control loops. 
OPEN & PARTNER EFFECTIVELY
OPEN APIs
TM Forum offers 18 Open APIs (with more
under development) to manage services end
to end and throughout their lifecycle in a
multi-partner environment.
DIGITAL SERVICES TOOLKIT
Currently under development, this toolkit will
help companies rapidly address business
problems using a collection of interlinked
assets based on Frameworx.
ONLINE B2B2X STEP-BY-STEP
PARTNERING GUIDE
This guide explains the five stages required
to build a partner relationship. Each
stage provides key concepts, strategy and
approach, worksheets, examples and exit
criteria to enable streamlined and repeatable
implementation.
21
Microservices: Piecing
together a strategy
RESEARCH & PUBLICATIONS
eBOOKS
Platforms: How to join the revolution
Open APIs: Turning business strategy into
reality
Omnichannel: Navigating new territory
INSIGHTS RESEARCH
CUSTOMER CENTRICITY
Cloud BSS: The migration begins
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT
SOLUTION SUITE Digital transformation: Navigating the way to
This set of tools consists of six components: success
a guidebook, hundreds of metrics, a maturity
model, a lifecycle model, more than 40 Orchestration: Get ready for the platform
implementation use cases and an ROI model. revolution
BIG DATA ANALYTICS SOLUTION SUITE QUICK INSIGHTS
This set of tools includes a big data reference
model, a guidebook containing 65 use cases Data analytics & AI: Key to end-to-end
and 1700+ pre-defined metrics. management
360 DEGREE VIEW OF A CUSTOMER Customer experience: Why the quest never
This guidebook offer a 360-degree view of a ends
customer and explains how to put customers
at the center of considerations and actions.  WHITE PAPER
OSS of the future
SPONSORED FEATURE
FRAMEWORX 16.5
Putting Microservices into Practice
ADVANCES
Taking DIGITAL
microservices from theory into reality to achieve business agility
TRANSFORMATION THROUGH
COLLABORATIVE R&D
Since May 2016 hundreds of individuals from
a diverse range of member companies have
worked in TM Forum’s unique collaborative
environment to deliver new features in
TM Forum Frameworx™ 16.5 The projects were
all within the context of the Forum’s strategic
programs: Open APIs & Digital Platforms, Agile
Business & IT, the Internet of Everything and
Customer Centricity & Analytics.
Customer Centricity & Analytics
This program focuses on development of
the Forum’s extensive library of customer
experience management (CEM) assets, metrics
and best practices for big data analytics. New
features include:
n the Big Data Analytics Guidebook, which
provides a new automated toolkit for data
analytics maturity to provide a starting point
for assessing an organization’s current state
and identifying opportunities for closing
critical analytics gaps;
n evolution of the TM Forum Information
Framework to help operational support
systems scale with increasing quantities
of transactional data;
n enhancements to the Analytics Big Data
Repository (ABDR), which address critical
domains such as the customer and billing;
n an important Catalyst project called Cognitive
Digital Agent, which demonstrated how to
create the next generation of customer
care services through machine learning and
artificial intelligence; and
n a new version of the Guidebook on a 360
Degree view of the Customer, which includes
a new method for outside-in scoring of
customer experience – this approach helps
service providers move beyond the traditional
Net Promoter Score (NPS) in measuring
customer sentiment.
Contact Robert Walker, Senior Director,
Customer Centricity & Analytics Program,
TM Forum for more information or if you’d like
to get involved via rwalker@tmforum.org
Open APIs
Building on the release of the new API crowd
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sourcing template in June 2016 and phase two
of the Open API Manifesto, which now includes
19 of the world’s largest service providers and
technology ecosystem partners, this team has
delivered:
n an additional 13 API specifications bringing
the total number of Open APIs to 31 – new
APIs include balance management, loyalty
management and change management;
n three conformance profiles and test scripts
for the Product Catalog API, Trouble Ticket API
and Entity Provisioning API; and
n an Open API governance guidebook,
specifically designed to ensure consistency.
Contact Joann O’Brien, Vice President,
Open APIs & Ecosystems, TM Forum, for
more information or to get involved via
jobrien@tmforum.org
SPONSORED FEATURE

Agile Business & IT
This program, which includes the Zero-touch
Putting Microservices into Practice
Orchestration, Operations and Management
(ZOOM) project, helps organizations continuously
Taking microservices from theory into reality
optimize their IT and business operations.
Additions include:
n the first release of a blueprint for a Hybrid
Network Management Platform, providing a
guide to creating a management platform –
this forms the foundation for major work in
2017 to bring together multiple open-source
groups to demonstrate how to implement
such a platform;
n an information guide about procuring and
onboarding virtual network functions, which
draws on work in an important Catalyst
proof-of-concept project called Enabling the
The Internet of Everything
The goal of this program is to enable an open
digital ecosystem where new services can be
delivered quickly, easily
to achieve and securely
business using a
agility
wide range of business models and partners.
New additions include:
n the hugely popular recent ebook Navigating
the IoE Roadmap of Challenges: Insights
and opinions for digital businesses, which
provides a reference listing of the top 20
business, technology and market challenges
facing all companies in the digital economy;
n an important Catalyst project called Smart
life: My home, my city, my planet, which
demonstrated the foundation for an agile
IoE ecosystem;
n enhancement of the Digital Services
What are you waiting for?
TM Forum’s members can download Frameworx
16.5’s assets and deliverables right now.
As Nik Willetts, Deputy CEO, TM Forum, explains,
“All TM Forum members can now leverage new
toolkits, best practices, maturity models, guides
and technical reports to help them tackle the
most pressing challenges their businesses are
facing.
“Whether you’re looking to transform your
networks to achieve business and IT agility,
drive true customer centricity, or drive growth
through new platform business models,
TM Forum members are working together to
deliver pragmatic, real-world solutions.”

Digital Services Marketplace with Onboarding
Automation;
n continued collaborative work on introducing
DevOps methodologies into traditional
network operations, including a study on the
impacts of working across multiple partners in
such an environment;
Reference Architecture (DSRA) with a new And if you’re missing out because you’re not
Privacy Management service definition, a member, contact Tim Banham, Managing
which for the first time provides privacy Director, Member Engagement & Sales,
management support across the DSRA TM Forum via tbanham@tmforum.org NOW.
and introduces the Privacy Management API;
and
n extensions of the widely successful TR211

n a refresh of established Frameworx training Online B2B2X Partnering Step-by-Step

courses to ensure they remain fully up-to-
date with the latest uses of the Forum’s
Business Process (eTOM), Information (SID)
and Application (TAM) frameworks for digital
transformation initiatives.
If you’d like to know more about ZOOM, contact
Ken Dilbeck, Vice President, Collaborative R&D,
TM Forum via kdilbeck@tmforum.org
Guide and TR424 B2B2X Business Scenario
Template to include new sections on
monetization and the platform economy.
Contact Craig Bachmann, Senior Director, Open
Digital Program, TM Forum, via cbachmann@
tmforum.org if you’d like to find out more or get
involved.

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For more about the Forum’s work on microservices, including
how to get involved, contact Joann O’Brien, Vice President,
APIs & Ecosystems, TM Forum, via jobrien@tmforum.org