The Telemanagement Forum bills itself as a driving force for digital transformation for telecommunications companies and the technology vendors that serve them. This transformation was prevalent across the TM Forum’s DTW24-Ignite flagship conference in Copenhagen this week.

I interviewed several vendors at the conference and boiled down my list to nine of the most disruptive.

Many of them are disrupting the staid business support system or BSS market, a longstanding category of customer-facing technology for telcos. Digital transformation has upended the BSS market. Simplicity and value-added services are the name of the game for today’s telephony consumers.

Another related market segment in the throes of disruption: monetization platforms. Scratch any telco carrier and you’ll find a billing engine at its heart – and today, they all want to bill for numerous add-on and third-party services. Handling the full lifecycle for such services is now big business.

My third group of vendors: standouts in their respective areas, including security, data warehouse and – no article would be complete without it – artificial intelligence.

Here are my picks:

Disrupting the BSS market

BSS traditionally comprises product management, order management, revenue management and customer management. Today’s telco customers – consumers especially – expect a rapid, seamless digital experience across these capabilities when they interact with their respective telephony providers. They don’t want the various BSS silos to interfere with their experience or slow them down.

These three next-generation BSS vendors all address this problem in different ways. The cloud native, SaaS-based platform from triPica integrates all BSS functions into a single, coherent interface, including catalog and billing, analytics, customer loyalty, eSIM and know-your-customer functionality.

TriPica supports a CRM interface for agents in real-time, so that they can see what individual customers are doing while leveraging cross-customer analytics.

What makes triPica stand out: Its platform has a single application programming interface-based integration touchpoint with the mobile service operator, simplifying onboarding of the triPica platform.

Csmart Synapse from Covalense Digital Solutions Private Ltd. is also a software-as-a-service-based, cloud-native BSS. Csmart Synapse’s main differentiator is its prebuilt workflows leveraging its modular microservices-based architecture.

What makes Covalensedigital stand out: The Csmart Synapse platform supports the TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture and Open API standards, giving the company’s telco customers industry-standard integration and service composability capabilities. As a result, Covalensedigital helps its customers become technology providers in their own right.

To differentiate itself from competitors such as triPica and Covalensedigital, ZIRA Ltd. focuses on ‘B2B2X’ customers – that is, business-to-business to either consumer or business end-customers.

What makes ZIRA stand out: The company focuses on partner management, including both supplier and customer partners. The platform supports the entire partner journey — enrollment, provisioning, operations and the like — helping ZIRA’s telco customers create and manage their own partner ecosystems.

Supporting monetization, aka ‘Show me the money’

Leveraging its heritage as a billing company, MATRIXX Software Inc. brings real-time monetization to the telco marketplace.

In essence, MATRIXX handles everything that must happen after a customer clicks the “buy” button, regardless of whether that individual be a consumer, a wholesaler or an enterprise customer.

What makes MATRIXX stand out: The company offers no-code configuration capabilities that empower nontechnical personnel at MATRIXX’s telco customers to build differentiated offerings.

CloudBlue, a subsidiary of Ingram Micro Inc., extends its parent’s history as a technology distributor. It describes its monetization platform as an “ecosystem platform” to differentiate it from a marketplace. In fact, CloudBlue offers its telco customers a platform for building and running their own marketplaces.

What makes CloudBlue stand out: Its platform specializes in the monetization of subscription offerings. Subscriptions are particularly difficult to monetize because they are inherently variable, raising the complexity for the telco. CloudBlue addresses that complexity.

Of the three monetization platforms in this article, Apptium Technologies LLC is arguably the most mature. The company offers an end-to-end cloud commerce platform for telcos as well as the media, financial services, and high-tech industries.

Apptium offers front-office and back-office commerce solutions, supporting both customer-facing needs as well as dealing with the complex constraints of legacy technologies.

What makes Apptium stand out: The company’s “ecosystem orchestration” makes products and services transactable – even if they weren’t before moving to the platform.

Other ‘best in show’ highlights

Mitigant GmbH is a cloud security posture management vendor that helps companies secure their infrastructure in public clouds or on Kubernetes.

Mitigant’s core capability is attack emulation, going beyond traditional penetration testing to analyze what bad actors would do once they compromise a system or network.

What makes Mitigant stand out: The company takes a page from the chaos engineering playbook, where companies would routinely attack their infrastructure to test their systems’ resilience. What better way to test resistance to cybersecurity attacks than by forcing breaches to see what happens?

Quantexa Ltd. offers an AI-based decision intelligence platform that leverages customer and third-party data to uncover risks facing the organization. Based upon those risks, Quantexa builds decision models that recommend actions to its customers.

What makes Quantexa stand out: The company leverages custom-built AI (not generative AI) to unify disparate data with entity resolution and then create context for those data via a knowledge graph. These capabilities resolve many subtle quality issues in the source data, leading to better results with few hallucinations.

Ocient Inc. offers a hyperscale data warehouse that the company purpose-built to take advantage of modern NVMe and SSD storage infrastructure. As a result, the platform can deliver performance and scalability that compares well with the leading cloud-based data warehouse technologies on the market.

Ocient is cloud-agnostic, running in any public or private cloud, or on-premises when customers require it. In addition to telco, Ocient has achieved traction in government, ad tech, and companies that leverage real-time geospatial data, for example, self-driving vehicle companies.

What makes Ocient stand out: The data warehouse supports larger working data sets than competitors’ offerings. Such working sets leverage faster, “hot” storage, as opposed to slower, dormant storage for superior performance. Ocient is thus better suited for customers with real-time requirements over massive data sets.

Telco’s lessons for the enterprise

I covered Mobile World Congress a few months ago – the much larger telco conference that offered all things telecommunications, including hardware, software and services.

DTW Ignite, in contrast, focused more specifically on software, in large part because of TM Forum’s leadership in open architecture and API standards.

This standards-based playing field reinforces the cloud-native priorities of telcos and the vendors that serve them, just as cloud-native practices are driving innovation in enterprise information technology.

The result is a type of convergence – not the switched network/IP network convergence of the last century, but a communications/IT convergence that leverages cloud-native computing and communications infrastructure to support digital priorities across the board.

As with all digital transformation success stories, the winners are the customers. And as we’re all customers of the telcos, we can take solace in such progress.

Jason Bloomberg is founder and president of Intellyx, which advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer.

Photo: Jason Bloomberg