Analyst top picks for Digital Transformation World Series

Two weeks before the start of TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series, we asked TM’s principal analyst, Dean Ramsay, to name the session he’s most looking forward to each week and why. Dean Ramsay: You’ve asked me a difficult question, given the range of topics and with more than 60 CxOs attending from around the globe. Philip Jansen, CEO of BT, is just the latest CEO to confirm attendance and we’ll also be hearing from Telenor’s Sigve Brekke and Verizon’s Ronan Dunne. And there is a great line of senior speakers from Axiata, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, MTN, Orange, Ooredoo, Telefonica, and Vodafone to name just a few of the CSPs, as well as hyperscalers, AWS, Google and Microsoft and the industry's major suppliers. With events around the world curtailed or cancelled, it feels like our regular view into the details of what the CSPs have been doing has been interrupted and DTWS is a great chance to reconnect. So since I’m spoilt for choice, and I have to pick only one per week, I’ve gone for the sessions that are linked to my current research.

Week 1 I’m really looking forward to Nikos Katinakis from Telstra’s presentation on Enabling the tech driven telco: Developing a clear technology roadmap for support the operating model of the future as this is a macro topic that runs through much of my research work. It’s always great to hear directly from a CSP that is heavily engaged in changing the way they work. Telstra are a great example of a large operator that is addressing business diversification challenges head on with many different pioneering initiatives, and are starting to show some significant new lines of business revenues, so I’m sure our audience will be very interested in the technology decisions they have made to get them where they are today.

Week 2 There are lots of great sessions in week 2, but I’m especially looking forward to the AT&T and Ericsson case study on Service Management and Orchestration for Open RAN as the service level evolutions going on in OSS/BSS to support 5G is a bigger challenge for CSPs than it may seem. The emergence of Open RAN adds another moving piece to the puzzle, and is certainly stirring up the commercial relationships in the 5G ecosystem, so I really interesting in both AT&T and Ericsson take on transformational best practice. Being able to master service level orchestration is key to optimally monetizing 5G investments as the MNOs scale out the networks, so this is a big deal.

Week 3 Tony Poulos’s interview with Andrew Ward from du caught my eye in week 3, titled Migrating and managing your entire cloud estate from one unified single platform. Obviously, this is a hot topic right now because many of the cloud migration decisions that CSPs are making in 2021 will have operational and business ramifications for the next decade. Managing a CSPs whole IT estate from a single platform isn’t the way that all CSPs are going with their cloud strategy, so I’m really interested in du’s insight and details on the cloud environment configurations they are deploying.

Week 4: Growing B2B and B2B2X is a current area of focus for the TM Forum Research team, so week 4 has a some really relevant sessions for us and our readership. My top pick from week 4 is the Vodafone and Oracle keynote Leveraging co-creation to provide unique value and growth to B2B(2X) segment. We often hear about CSPs drive towards agility in operations to pivot towards new service opportunities or quickly build new speculative lines of business away from the traditional telco connectivity model, but the details of CSP are actually doing that are few and far between. So I think Vodafone will be sharing some really interesting insight in the how they are increasing their participation in the new value chains in unfamiliar vertical industries and new lines of business.

TM Forum's Digital Transformation World Series is a global event for telco leaders who want to solve the problems of digital transformation. Join the four week digital event and hear from over 50+ C-level speakers, network with 10,000+ attendees from 165+ countries, upskill yourself through masterclasses, training sessions and more. Register now. Note: Communication service providers: you can claim your free pass here.