The Phoenix Tree TM Forum Catalyst project aims to help service providers more easily and fully leverage the growing mountains of data stored in their siloed business support systems and operational support systems (BSS/OSS.) These applications can improve internal efficiencies and create new products and business models.
To date, creating platforms for the collection of data from these silos was slow and used significant staff and hardware resources, according to a TM Forum blog. The open source Catalyst project, which is being championed by China Mobile, addresses these challenges.
The goal is to enable the organization to create a big data platform capable of aggregating data from all domains across the enterprise. The project – the full name is Phoenix Tree: Centralized Big Data PaaS Platform – will enable external companies innovate with the data.
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Speed is a key factor. A centralized platform through which data from the entire OSS/BSS is available will enable quick building and deployment of data-driven applications. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) enables use of agile development environments and makes available the hardware and software tools necessary to create the applications.
The platform that will be exhibited this month at Digital Transformation World in Nice is designed to manage 25,000 servers, store 100 petabytes of data and support more than 100 tenants, the post says.
China Mobile's size is an indicator of why such a project is valuable. The provider has more than 920 million mobile and 163 million broadband customers spread out across 31 provinces and Singapore. Needless to say, that represents a lot of data -- and a lot of opportunity. The carrier thinks that this data can best be leveraged with the standardized PaaS approach. Other participants in the project are AsiaInfo, Huawei, the Beijing Orient National Communications Science and Technology Company and the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
The post says that that the companies are now are on-boarding users to Phoenix Tree. The project has a dual purpose: On one hand, it aims to improve internal CSP digital operations, management capabilities and service efficiency. On the other, it will enable enterprise partners in finance, public security, mobility and elsewhere to build data driven applications.
China Mobile is providing hardware resources, networking, central processing units and the overall "challenge" specifications. The other participating companies are bringing service resources to the table and are building the common data model that organizes and standardizes the data. They also are providing the application toolkit for users.