The first TM Forum Innovation Hub will open in Mumbai on December 1st thanks to a partnership between Reliance Industries’ (RIL) telecom subsidiary Jio and TM Forum, a global alliance of telecom and tech companies. To benefit the industry, the Innovation Hub will prioritize developing Large Language Models (LLM), Open Digital Architecture, and Generative AI (GenAI) more quickly.
The Innovation Hub initiative was introduced during the TM Forum’s yearly DTW-Ignite conference in Copenhagen two months ago. The Innovation Hub program’s trial phase is scheduled to end in March 2024, and a third pilot project is about to get underway. In 2024, members of the TM Forum will have the opportunity to apply to join an ongoing Innovation Hub project or suggest a new one.
At the event, which took place at Reliance Corporate IT Park in Navi Mumbai, there were representatives from Jio, TM Forum, and the Innovation Hub Founding Members, which include Accenture, Deutsche Telekom, Google Cloud, Orange, Telenor, and Vodafone.
According to a release from the corporations, Mumbai was chosen as the site of the inaugural TM Forum Innovation Hub since it is the hub of talent for software development worldwide in India.
The application of generative AI and LLM to high-priority telco use cases is one of the hub’s initial areas of focus. This includes creating an architecture blueprint to make the responsible use of generative AI for brownfield telecoms technology landscapes easier, while also addressing the associated security, privacy, accuracy, performance, and scalability challenges.
Accelerating the development and acceptance of the Open Digital Architecture developed by TM Forum would be one of the second set of key areas.“ODA underpins the creation of a modular, componentised, and reusable cloud-native software to replace traditional BSS and OSS. Objectives include creating Reference Implementation(s) of the ODA Canvas and components, as well as migration patterns and innovative approaches to simplify migration from legacy software to ODA-compliant, cloud-native components,” the release added.
Commenting on the launch of the hub, Akash Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, said: “The TM Forum Innovation Hub is about delivering real-world solutions that will change our industry and there is no better way than to lean on talent from across the industry to solve our existing challenges as well as finding better ways to overcome future obstacles. We are delighted to see the first innovation hub open on our Mumbai campus as I believe Mumbai is the perfect location to foster the innovation needed.”
Dr Steffen Roehn, TM Forum Chair and Partner at Bain & Company, said: “The TM Forum Innovation Hub will prove hugely beneficial as our members explore new technologies, more radical approaches to transform their organizations and strengthen their muscles.”
The Innovation Hub projects will yield results that will benefit the entire membership of the TM Forum as well as the industry at large. These benefits include the creation of new avenues for industry collaboration, the resolution of problems with “real” results that can be put into practice, and the acceleration of the development of code assets.