Gotransverse
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Sep 23, 2022It’s safe to say that, for the Gotransverse team, one of the highlights of 2021 was joining TM Forum and participating in the Catalyst Program. TM Forum is an association of over 850 member companies, including the world's top ten network and communications providers, and stretches across 180 countries. And its Catalyst program develops collaborative, proof-of-concept projects that offer solutions to everyday business problems using best practices that ensure scalability with reduced costs and low risk.
Our 2021 project, undertaken in conjunction with Salesforce, Verizon, M1 Limited, Matrixx, and Mirakl, set out to demonstrate how multiple vendors can collaborate to create a catalog-driven monetization platform that offers 5G-based products and services. The Marketplace is designed to use automated, third-party service delivery, including partner account management, revenue share, and settlement. We were thrilled when our project was selected as the winner in the “Best Ecosystem Design” category, validating both our collaborative efforts and our perception of the need for sophisticated monetization in the rapidly growing 5G sphere.
Given all of that, we are positively counting down the days until we head to Copenhagen, along with our Catalyst project partners, to show Phase II of the B2B2X marketplace for 5G services at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World this month.
The 2022 Catalyst Project
“Building on the success of last year’s TM Forum Catalyst demonstration, this year we will show the next phase of 5G marketplace monetization and the potential of offers for telecommunications companies. We aim to automate an end-to-end, catalog-driven business model that provides revenue sharing for multi-party 5G services using real-time charges, revenue sharing, and settlement.”
- James Messer, Founder & CEO, Gotransverse
This year’s Catalyst project, “Supercharged Edge-Aware Marketplaces,” is a joint initiative with Verizon, Vodafone Group, Blue Planet (a division of Ciena), MATRIXX Software, and Salesforce. It's designed to demonstrate how a marketplace for communications service providers (CSPs) can support new business models selling value-based 5G services.
Why is this important? Traditionally CSPs have charged for services based on network metrics like volume of data consumed or minutes of use. But in a marketplace environment, where CSPs are partnering with other vendors to provide more complex service offerings, the monetization strategies have to match.
This year’s TM Forum Catalyst project will show how to do just that, demonstrating how third party device and service providers can transform their commercial models can use guaranteed service level insights to deliver an innovative and improved customer experience through 5G network slicing and multi-access edge computing (MEC). Here are just a few of its advantages:
- Knowledge of resources available at a service location, along with dynamic pricing based on value delivered, usage, and network orchestration activities.
- Built-in, automated revenue sharing across multiple partners CSPs, application developers, device vendors and other service providers, and edge network operators.
- Real-time insight and artificial intelligence forecasts for dynamic pricing. (For example, CSPs can offer discounted services during low-load periods to improve customer engagement and increase revenue.)
- Predictive analytics with real-time network data empowering means customers to activate more features with more bandwidth and MEC available—while saving money.
In short, the ecosystem provides end-to-end awareness of real-time performance to adapt as needed for customer-facing business processes. As a result, the 5G infrastructure makes more efficient use of resources and fixed costs and creates new business opportunities for CSPs and their partners.
Our Catalyst Partners
Any great innovation must be a team effort. Just as CSPs require partnerships to give their customers the full benefits of 5G, we couldn't have created this catalyst project without our incredible team members from Verizon, Vodafone Group, Blue Planet, MATRIXX Software, and Salesforce. Here’s what a few of them have to say about the project:
“The TM Forum catalysts are a unique opportunity for innovation and experimentation. We are pleased to join forces with our industry-leading partners to showcase the next wave of monetization for new B2B2X business models and multiparty ecosystems essential to the future of 5G evolution."
- Marc Price, CTO, MATRIXX Software
"Salesforce is excited about its continued participation in the TM Forum catalyst program. We see it as a vital part of our innovation process to help test and refine new concepts in collaboration with service providers and our ecosystem partners before taking them to market commercially."
- David Fan, VP & GM of Communications Products, Salesforce
“5G brings about the promise of futuristic immersive experiences — and monetizing these experiences — powered by network slicing and intelligent automation. Together with our partners, Blue Planet will showcase through this Catalyst demonstration how end-to-end network slicing can help service providers tailor their network resources to deliver these new dynamic experiences.”
- Kailem Anderson, Vice President of Portfolio and Engineering, Blue Planet
Stay Tuned for Updates on Gotranvserse’s Trip to Copenhagen
We’ll share updates about TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World and our Catalyst project in future blog posts. In the meantime, to learn more about our billing platform and the growth it empowers for communications services providers (as well as our clients in a wide range of other industries) we invite you to take a virtual tour today.