DTW 2022: Catalyst Awards celebrate excellence in innovation

On the last day of Digital Transformation World in the Bella Center in Copenhagen, TM Forum’s 2022 Catalyst awards honored the outstanding achievements of teams working on innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the industry and broader society.

Since the beginning of the year, 40 Catalyst projects have been working together collaboratively to develop viable solutions and proofs of concepts to improve how communications service providers (CSPs) and their technology partners do business, innovate and serve customers amid rapid digital transformation.

The level of teamwork and coordination in the Catalysts is impressive – with 727 people involved from 150 companies from six continents, the commitment and project management alone are worthy of praise. It is also interesting to note that 246 of those involved are from communication service provider companies, so it’s clear they are convinced of the value of the program.

By accelerating R&D through a structured agile collaborative process, Catalyst projects prove the application of new technologies and validate emerging standards. During the DTW event, 27 Catalyst teams demonstrated their proof-of-concept work live, and a further 13 were represented virtually. The new solutions they showcased span artificial intelligence, customer experience, sustainability, cross-industry 5G services, marketplaces and platforms.

A panel of 21 independent judges chose the winning Catalysts projects across seven areas from shortlisted projects in recognition of their contributions to advancing the telecoms industry, their acceleration of digital transformation, their work on standards and their impact on global sustainability goals.

The winning teams are:

Outstanding Catalyst – Business impact

Title: Zero-touch digital marketplace - Phase III

About: Focusing initially on four key industries - sports, healthcare, mining and gaming - this Catalyst helps CSPs realize new revenue streams as countless sectors undergo digital transformation in the years ahead.

Champions: Colt Technology, Gamestream, The Football Association, stc, Verizon

Participants: Amazon Web Services, Cognizant, Hansen Technologies, NEC, Sterlite Technologies Limited

Outstanding Catalyst – Impact on society and sustainability

Title: Intelligent edge for sustainable agriculture

About: This project provides a scalable blueprint for an integrated solution based on 5G network slicing for optimization of latency and throughput requirements, MEC orchestration and automation to address diversity among use cases and to support future proofing, and a new framework for seamless deployment of AI at the edge.

Champions: TELUS, Verizon

Participants: CloudBlue, Epam, ETIYA, Red Hat

Outstanding Catalyst – Best innovation

Title: Telco data space - Phase II

About: The project introduces AI to commercial off-the-shelf software for autonomous networks - enabling CSPs to share data within a sovereign, federated cloud infrastructure, governed by data policy usage controls set by data owners, consortium partners and regulators.

Champions: Etisalat UAE, Orange, Vodafone

Participants: Datapply.ai, Ikanotis Partners, Infosys, IntegraTouch, IoT Lab

Outstanding use of TM Forum assets

Title: Green 5G

About: The project uses TM Forum Autonomous Networks technology to define a unified energy efficiency standard, and a methodology to deliver it across different business requirements, for instance in building energy saving capabilities for base stations.

Champions: China Mobile, PT XL Axiata

Participants: China Unitechs, Huawei Technologies, Nokia, ZTE

Best ecosystem design

Title: Supercharged edge-aware marketplaces - Phase II

About: This Catalyst is creating a common digital marketplace where customers can understand which edge services are available in any given location, so that CSPs can make it much easier to market and sell edge computing. In deploying these localized edge stores, CSPs will gain a much more sophisticated understanding of demand and be in a far greater position to adapt and adjust pricing.

Champions: Verizon, Vodafone

Participants: Ciena, Gotransverse, MATRIXX Software, Salesforce

Best New Catalyst in show

Title: Converged access for ODA

About: This Catalyst enables CSPs and vendors to better monetize their investments, as well as deliver improved business flexibility for customers.

Champions: Etisalat UAE, GCI Communication Corp, NBNCo, Telstra, Verizon, Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications (VNPT)

Participants: Future Connections, Incognito Software Systems, Sterlite Technologies Limited

Best New Catalyst in show

Title: Async Open APIs for event based architectures

About: By introducing a subset of the Open Digital Architecture (ODA), and RESTful Open APIs to streaming platforms, this Catalyst helps event streaming take huge steps toward the levels of interoperability befitting the IoT era

Champions: BT, CityFibre, Orange, Reliance Jio, Telenor, Verizon, Vodafone

Participants: Aria Systems, Bit2win, Epam Systems, Tech Mahindra, Yupiik

Best New Catalyst in show

Title: Talent for tomorrow

About: This project develops a low-code training platform to intelligently spot talent and upskill staff by matching them to relevant interactive training modules.

Champions: China Unicom

Participants: BroadTech Technology, China Information Technology Designing Consulting Institute, Huawei Technologies

Future Techco

Title: Digital twin network application in 5G network operations

About: This Catalyst shows how a new digital twin network platform can help service providers to simulate network performance and demand based on historic user-based AI - then apply business rules, knowledge graphs and machine learning inference models to verify SLA guarantees and configure network slices.

Champions: China Mobile

Participants: AsiaInfo, Beijing Ultrapower Software, SI-TECH

People’s choice (Voting based)

Title: Green 5G

About: This project uses TM Forum Autonomous Networks technology to define a unified energy efficiency standard, and a methodology to deliver it across different business requirements, for instance in building energy saving capabilities for base stations.

Champions: China Mobile, PT XL Axiata

Participants: China Unitechs, Huawei Technologies, Nokia, ZTE

Learn more about the Catalyst program and how to get involved here https://www.tmforum.org/collaboration/catalyst-program/home/