Accelerating telecommunications growth at DTW23 - Ignite

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are at an inflection point, with leaders and their teams asking far-reaching questions, and looking at new ways to drive innovation and unlock greater value for their customers and business.

With collaboration essential to unlocking industry transformation, I really enjoyed being in Copenhagen at DTW23 - Ignite, meeting with industry colleagues and friends, as the wider ecosystem came together to reignite industry growth, invigorated with a renewed sense of urgency and an appetite to embrace emerging technologies, such as generative AI.

Building on our partnership with TM Forum

Last year we were excited to join TM Forum, working with the Forum and its members to bolster its mission to unlock the growth and potential of the telecoms industry.

We have continued to build on our partnership at this year’s event, including our participation as one of the founding members of the TM Forum Innovation Hub, a new strategic initiative launched during the event that brings together committed teams, of dedicated resources, from across the technology sector to tackle the industry’s most pressing challenges, and explore the exciting new opportunities presented by emerging technologies.

As part of the Innovation Hub pre-pilot, TM Forum has prototyped use of Google’s gen AI to develop a ‘TM Forum Guru’ — with a goal of providing a natural language interface for TM Forum Community members to ask their technical questions and be served up generated responses, each carefully referenced and sourced, to help them in their day-to-day work. Unlocking the value, and information within, of several thousand TM Forum knowledge assets in a short period of time, the blueprint for this initiative is planned to be packaged to support broader CSP industry adoption of such powerful technologies.

Alongside the ‘TM Forum Guru,’ the Google Cloud team were also invited to share a gen-AI-powered demo that Google's Global Network (GGN) team uses to support high levels of reliability on Google’s global scale network operations, demonstrating how CSPs can leverage postmortems of past network incidents to help their engineers shorten the time to resolution using Google Cloud's Vertex AI Search to identify the root cause and fix any new issues for on-call engineers.

We were also honoured to become the latest signatory of the ODA Manifesto and showcase our newly available Google Cloud instance of the TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture canvas. The Canvas’ services such as security, monitoring and service mesh are now available as fully-managed and scalable services from Google Cloud, minimizing the IT and network operations burden on CSPs.

Furthermore, Google Cloud was proud to collaborate with partners and customers on two catalysts programs:

• GenAI hyper-personalized customer experience - Google Cloud’s Open Innovation Catalyst — using a ready-to-deploy AI-driven customer engagement framework that has shown significant ROI through complex event-processing combining real-time AI/machine learning (ML) models in real time with curated gen AI. This catalyst program was a collaborative team effort with participation from Google Cloud, Accenture and Pega Systems, supported by CSP Champions: BT Group, Bell Canada, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia SpA, and Turknet. TM Forum presented this catalyst project with the prestigious catalyst award for ‘Excellence In the application of AI and Automation’.
• Green and efficient radio access networks (Moonshot catalyst) - focused on how the Telecoms industry can lead the world towards carbon neutrality and reduce its own energy consumption, with the goal to cut 25% of telco energy consumption by 2025. A fantastic collaboration across a diverse suite of CSPs and technology providers, system integrators to explore latest radio, antennae and AI/ML innovations, this catalyst program was a collaborative team effort with participation from Google Cloud, Capgemini, Ericsson, Orange, Telenor Group, Verizon, Vodafone, and others.

Expert best practices to achieve telecom business outcomes

Google Cloud partnered with TM Forum, partners, and customers to share best practices and lessons learned in sessions covering gen AI, cloud-native software, platforms, and sustainability.

These sessions brought experts collaborating together on points of view on improving the customer experience, accelerating subscriber growth, and simplifying processes through a diverse array of sessions, demos, and panels including. Check out the CSP decision maker’s guide to DTW23 - Ignite for more details.

New products to accelerate industry transformation

In addition, we continue to work with partners across the Telecom ecosystem to develop solutions on Google Cloud that help CSPs digitally transform their business.

During DTW23, Ericsson announced an expansion of our strategic partnership to develop an Ericsson Cloud RAN solution on Google Distributed Cloud (GDC). The joint solution offers integrated automation and orchestration using AI/ML and enables faster delivery of services, increased efficiency, and greater flexibility and optimization opportunities in CSP networks.

Nokia launched their AVA Data Suite, designed to run on Google Cloud, to help CSPs standardize data and facilitate the development of AI/ML software applications. The solution provides CSPs and data scientists with standardized, pre-correlated data products packages to accelerate the development of AI solutions for enhanced network performance and sustainability, improved subscriber experience, and new revenue streams.

Netcracker Technology also announced that it is working with Google Cloud to advance the use of gen AI technology in the telecom industry. Finally, Optiva announced the launch of Optiva MVNO Hubs BSS as a Service on Google Cloud, and VIAVI announced the availability of NITRO® AIOps on Google Cloud for cloud-based network intelligence and optimization.

Closing thoughts

It was an inspiring week seeing and being a part of the launch of TM Forum’s Innovation Hub, meeting with customers and partners, joining impactful round-tables on some of the biggest questions that the industry is facing, participating in Catalyst projects, and so much more. I am incredibly excited and energized by the opportunities that lie ahead for the industry — the TM Forum’s mission to support industry collaboration and innovation is one that we at Google Cloud shares, together with the wider industry ecosystem. Thank you to all of our customers, partners, Google teams, and to TM Forum!

To learn more about how Google Cloud is partnering with CSPs, check out our Google Cloud for Telecommunications page.