Zero-Touch Partnering

A buyer may onboard, discover, integrate, qualify, order and manage products and services from a supplier with complete flowthrough and without any IT work.

This needs to be a key objective of our industry so that geographically and product-constrained telcos can retain and grow revenues.

Zero Touch Partnering (ZTP) allows communities of service providers to partner seamlessly to provide maximum value and convenience to customers, achieving one of the key objectives of TM Forum Open Digital Architecture.

Download the Zero Touch Partnering Guide.

A number of key industry experimental projects have been undertaken by DGIT Systems in this industry journey to Zero Touch Partnering (ZTP), including:

  1. B2B service bundling which shows the use of TM Forum Open APIs to order a mix of service types:
  2. Partnering Platform for MEF Services:
  3. Pocket Sized Model Driven Networks (MEF Forum PoC Project), which show both Network as a Service (NaaS) and the Zero Touch Partnering APIs being utilised by a mobile phone app:
  4. Zero Touch Marketplace Integration (TM Forum Catalyst project)
  5. Zero Touch Partnering

DGIT Systems has made a collection of contributions to the TM Forum and the MEF as direct outputs from these projects:

Zero Touch Marketplace 1.0 Project Outcomes

  • Onboard and establish programmatic communications with a supplier through catalog entry.
  • Learn service definitions (any service) that are available for you to order through TM Forum catalog APIs.
  • Offer compositions to your customers which include the learned service.
  • Order and manage services with the supplier through TMForum Open APIs

Proposed extensions to TM Forum assets and standards

  • Apply SID metadata patterns to Engaged Party ABE.
  • Extend Product Eligibility API.
  • Extend Product Ordering API.

Using SID metadata to govern API payloads

  • Define any service type as a SID specification or template then call the specification from within the API specification.
  • Support any service type.

Dynamic payloads in JSON TR254

  • Partial standardisation of metadata format in JSON reviewed and agreed by the TM Forum API working group.