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- The TM Forum, a global telecommunications industry association, has announced the “Mega Catalyst” project in which the IOTA Tangle will play a central role.
- To build a trusted supply chain in the telecommunications industry, both IOTA and R3 Corda technologies are used.
Via a blog post, TM Forum, a global industry association for service providers and their suppliers in the telecommunications industry, has announced the “Mega Catalyst” project. The project aims to build a complete trusted business ecosystem where telecom companies can interact with supply chain and distribution partners to deliver trusted Industry 4.0 solutions. Hereby the IOTA Tangle will play a central role as the distributed ledger technology.
Telecommunications giants rely on the IOTA Tangle
The TM forum is a massive alliance of industrial giants. Members of the TM Forum include communication and digital service providers, telephone companies, network operators, cloud providers, software vendors, suppliers, system integrators and management consultancies. Ten of the ten largest telecommunications service providers in the world belong to the initiative, along with 840 other companies, which develop so-called “catalysts”.
Catalysts are rapidly deployable proof of concepts that bring large and small companies together to develop innovative solutions to common challenges. They use best practices and standards from the TM Forum to ensure scalability, reusability, and reduced costs and risks. In a Catalyst project, there are two roles, “champions” who define the problem to be solved and the participants who implement the solution according to the champions’ specifications.
The “Mega Catalyst” combines three Catalyst projects into one project, with Agile Fractal Grid, BT, NTT, Etisalat, Maxbyte, Orange™, Chunghwa Telecom, Telus, Telekom, Rostelecom leading the project as champions. IOTA is one of the participants, as well as R3 Corda, who are involved in the implementation.
Specifically, the Mega Catalyst brings together the following three projects to “test the plug-and-play capabilities around Industry 4.0 Business Assurance”:
- AI driven business assurance for 5G
- Vertical Industry Telcos: a Federated DLT-based Marketplace
- Digital Business Marketplace III – Delivering end-to-end multi-partner Industry 4.0, now! – Phase III
The Mega Catalyst explores how these three catalysts can work together to illustrate how their different focuses and “layers” together can deliver a usable, structured and secure approach for all industry 4.0 partners.
The second project, DLT Catalyst, uses the IOTA Tangle to track data from physical devices immutable, while the third project, DBM, uses R3 Corda to secure ownership certificates of the virtual plug-and-play supply chain. As the blog post states, the two projects together deliver the capability of an industry 4.0 secure end-to-end hardware and software solution:
To enable the Mega catalyst, the IOTA Tangle data together with other relevant data from the companies in the supply chain are extracted by R3 Corda and then exposed to the ‘AI driven Business Assurance Catalyst’.
The AI driven business assurance Catalyst provides ecosystem trust and transparency by assuring revenues and business goals, identifying new controls that assure the completeness, correctness and trust of the marketplace, and using the distributed ledger as a data trust mechanism for these controls.
The author of the blog post states the progress of the project so far:
In this process of developing a new Business Assurance approach to ecosystems, the three Catalysts have offered powerful insights to how the individual ‘layers’ can deliver the required capabilities to expose the necessary services and data at control points for ecosystem assurance. These control points define the demarcation between the ‘layers’ and could be operationalized as potential assurance & governance APIs in the implementation of the supply chain use case.
