IOTA Foundation Receives TM Forum Award as Enabler for Digital Transformation
Last week, after a month of online keynotes, roundtables, presentations, and demonstrations, the Digital Transformation World Series 2020 ended with a live stream from the London offices of TM Forum, the event organizers.
On this last day, TM Forum, the organization driving digital transformation in the telecommunication industry, recognized the work of several solution and technology providers by awarding seven Outstanding Catalyst proof-of-concept projects. The awarded projects were selected for their significant contributions to the acceleration of digital transformation throughout the industry.
The IOTA Foundation, which is also a member of the TM Forum, was among those contributors awarded with the Business Impact Catalyst Award.
What is this initiative and how IOTA is being used?
During the last months, the IOTA Foundation joined the Digital Business Marketplace (DBM) TM Forum Catalyst.
A Catalyst is an innovation playground, in which TM Forum members come together to develop new innovative solutions, to solve challenges created by Champions (sponsors). The goal is to derive standards that the TM Forum can promote to drive the adoption and replicability of these innovations.
The DBM Catalyst Champions included: Agile Fractal Grid, BT, Chunghwa Telecom, Digital Twin Consortium, Etisalat UAE, Maxbyte, Heritage International AG USA, NTT, SteepleCom, Telenor, Telus.
Along with other technology providers, IOTA collaborated with Accenture, Altifio, AWS, BearingPoint//Beyond, Beautiful Ones, Cityzenith, Digiglu, Intel, Intuitus Cyber, IoT Lab, Mvine, R3, Stratus Technologies, Tantallon, Ulster University, University of Surrey, VETRO FiberMap.
The goal of this year DBM Catalyst was to explore how companies in traditional industries can be digitally transformed by further digitizing their products, services, and supply chain.
The result was the creation of a Digital Business Marketplace, in which companies select and orchestrate a number of integrated services, to deliver end-to-end solutions in vertical domains, such as Smart Grid, Smart Factory, Smart Theatre and Smart Logistic. All underpinned by the ability to provide zero-touch deployment and configuration of selected services.
Among other enabling technologies, such as 5G and AI, IOTA and IoT have been leveraged to enable digital transformation.
In a secure supply chain scenario, IOTA was leveraged to track location/chain of custody and ensure security and compliance of hardware infrastructure components, deployed in different scenarios. An example is the deployment of an infrastructure connectivity HW (i.e. Access Point) for enabling a Smart Entertainment scenario. The component, requested on the DBM, might travel from vendors to resellers to the final end-user, while its integrity and compliance should be guaranteed when moving between different owners. IOTA’s ledger and its ability to integrate with tracking devices, such as PING ASSETS and Zebra Technologies, has been leveraged to showcase how such a HW component’s journey will be implemented, while its compliance can be trusted in a multi-stakeholder ecosystem.
The tracking capabilities of IOTA’s existing supply chain TLIP infrastructure have been demonstrated and complemented with integration to other blockchain technologies, such as Corda, to allow the deployment of smart contracts for managing the “change of ownership” during each component’s journey. Learn more about it here.
As support for the Smart Factory scenario, IOTA Wallets have been integrated with the Maxbyte smart robots and byteFactory.ai solutions to provide capability as a service and pay as you use and to enable Digital Business Marketplace users to overcome any infrastructure limitation for the deployment of connected factories use cases. Learn more about it here.
Smart Grid use cases have also benefited from the DBM approach. New renewable energy sources can be discoverable and connected to the smart grid to balance its consumption in a more sustainable way. IOTA and Agile Fractal Grid explored the role of decentralization in supporting these scenarios, where distributed ledger like IOTA helps to share the information required to select such resources and to directly pay for their use. Learn more about it here.
To learn more about this complex ecosystem of collaborations enabled by the Digital Business Marketplace Catalyst and to follow its impact in enabling new digital transformation in the Smart-X domains please check out the DBM website.
Stay tuned for more blog posts explaining IOTA Foundation activities within the TM Forum and to understand the power of IOTA to enable digital transformation. Do not hesitate to reach out to Jens Munch and Michele Nati respectively if you want to discuss future uses of IOTA in secure supply chains and smart infrastructure.