Open ROADS Community Holds Inaugural Meeting in Singapore

SINGAPORE -- The Open ROADS (Real-time, On-demand, All-online, Do-It-Yourself, and Social) Community announced the successful completion of their inaugural meeting. The Open ROADS Community, an initiative powered by Huawei, was first launched at the Mobile World Congress in February at Barcelona. The Community brings together leading voices from across the industry to answer the urgent questions posed to industries and society by the transformation to Digital Business. The meeting was held at the St Regis Hotel in Singapore most recently and saw about 50 attendees from across the industry.

During the Advisory Board Meeting, founding Board Members drawn from global leading operators and solution providers defined, agreed and endorsed the initial objectives of the Open ROADS Community, with a particular focus on a consolidated approach to the ICT transformation to Digital Business. The Advisory Board members also approved a governance model and prioritized, formalized and appointed sponsors for the working groups and committees.

Dr. Howard Liang, Chairman, Open ROADS Community and Senior Vice President, Huawei said, “Digital business transformation has its own challenges, but by working and bringing together leading voices from across the industry, we can turn challenges into opportunities and become an incubator for ICT transformation best practices.”

The speakers included Christopher Thomas, CEO, The Stonington Group who challenged attendees to overlay their goals with strategic industry development imperatives. He highlighted the cloud inflexion point as the critical focus of operators to modernise their services to facilitate the rapidly changing expectations of digital customers.

Shekhar Kulkarni, Head of Digital Architecture, Telefonica Digital was present to address this point, emphasising the need for operators to provide a meaningful, relevant and contextual experience across all customer touch points. The role of operators has changed over the years, and there is a need for operators to be directly linked to developers, such that all requirements are taken into consideration right from the beginning.

Roberto Kung, Senior Vice President, Network Operation & Performance, Orange, then urged marketers, developers and operators to work closely together in order to transform and advance future mode of operations.

Commenting on the target of the Open ROADS Community, Trevor Cheung, Head of Standards and Industry Development Dept, Huawei Global Technical Service and Secretary of the Open ROADS Community, said, “The Open ROADS community brings together leading voices from across the industry to develop a holistic view of ICT transformation covering experience, operations and ICT infrastructure. This open and vendor neutral community will become the incubator for ICT transformation best practices, aiming to deliver supporting architectures, operating models and most importantly, reference implementations.”

The Open ROADS Community has been established by Huawei to address the challenges which telcos and related digital service providers face when attempting to transform to digital business operations. The Open ROADS Community will be incubator for the ICT transformation best practice.