At TM Forum Live! 2016, Huawei hosted the "Building Up Digital Operations and Ecosystem" Breakfast Briefing with TM Forum. The briefing brought together over 40 leading industry experts, analysts, and representatives from consulting firms, telecommunication companies and vendors in an open interactive round-table discussion to share valuable insights and best practices on digital operations transformation, the development of an open ecosystem, as well as how to ensure telecom carrier competitiveness in the digital age.

Industry leaders at the briefing concurred with Huawei's proposition that a ROADS user experience is the key objective of digital transformation, while digital operations and a digital business ecosystem are essential to enable this transition. They agreed the aim of digital operations is to create new business models and realize quick service provisioning and experimentation through agile iteration and product development. At the same time, the digital business ecosystem is critical to bring together business partners to complement each other's advantages and leverage digital operations to offer one-stop industry solutions and services, delivering win-win results for all.

At the briefing, leading operators shared their digital transformation vision, roadmaps, challenges and experience. Pascal Viginier, CIO and board member of France Telecom (FT), explained FT's "Digital Enterprise" strategy and key measures. Cristina Alvarez, CIO of Telefonica, shared the progress and experience of the operator's "Digital Telecom" strategy. Jenny Huang, Chief Architect from AT&T, provided insights on how to implement digital transformation based on Domain 2.0 and the next-generation digital operations platform ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy). Vodafone System Architect Lester Thomasshared Vodafone's digital operations strategy and architecture. Senior consultant Christian Kelly from Accenture discussed cloud service development and innovation.

Huawei has implemented a series of initiatives to drive the development of a digital ecosystem, including setting up competence and open labs around the world to enable multi-vendor capability development, establishing an Open ROADS Community as an incubator for global ICT best practices, and co-funding the Open-O project with partners to realize multi-vendor service orchestration. Huawei has also worked with the world's largest technology media company Light Reading to set up an online community "Telco Transformation", which highlights Huawei's thought leadership and commitment in enabling the transformation and digitalization of carriers' operations.

In addition, Huawei works closely with a number of industry associations such as TM Forum, The Open Group, OPNFV and Linux Foundation to promote open collaboration and the establishment of industry alliances. In the next three years, the company will invest over US$350 million in the enhancement of system integration and service capabilities, and will increase the number of consultants to 600 and expand the integration service team to over 4,000 people.

"Huawei realizes the importance of digital operations and industry ecosystems, and we've been investing a huge amount of resources and driving continuous R&D efforts to address this challenge," said Dr. Dong Sun, Chief Architect of Digital Transformation, Huawei. "The ultimate goal of telco's digital transformation is to get the agile capabilities in place to deliver a superior ROADS user experience anywhere anytime."

"While the industry has been proactively working on a framework for digital operations transformation, we don't think a framework is enough," said Sean Liu, Chief Branding Officer of Huawei Carrier Business Group, who gave keynote speech at IT Transformation Track of TM Forum Live! "We are proud that Huawei is the first in the industry to propose a platform solution - Huawei Telco OS, which can provide long-term strategic support to carriers to accelerate a digital ROADS user experience and the fully digitalized telco operations into reality."

Nik Willetts, Deputy CEO of TM Forum, said: "Digital transformation is not only a prominent trend of the ICT industry, but all industries seeking to thrive in the digital world. Digitalization of carriers' operational and customer-facing systems is crucial to ensuring operational efficiencies as well as top-line revenue growth," said Nik Willetts, Deputy CEO of TM Forum. "What's equally important is the establishment of interconnected digital ecosystems, without which successful digital transformation cannot occur. Carriers, technology providers and industry organizations need to work closely together to build these ecosystems."

The successful breakfast briefing once again showed the importance of digital operations has been widely recognized by industry leaders and the establishment of a digital business ecosystem is imperative. Looking ahead, a booming digital business ecosystem will play an increasingly crucial role in transforming a variety of industries and enriching people's life across the globe.