Analysts Insights from TM Forum DTW Ignite 2025 (with Dean Bubley and Patrick Lopez)

TM Forum Digital Transformation World (DTW) Ignite 2025 is one of the leading telco tech conferencesfocused on OSS, BSS and customer experience modernization. Some call it digital transformation but not Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis, who joined Patrick Lopez of {Core Analysis} and Leonard Lee for a recap of the event this year. 

This year, DTW Ignite was heavily slanted toward the topic of autonomous networks and reaching L4, but there was much more. The trio converged on Zoom to compare notes and share their thoughts on what mattered at DTW Ignite 2025.

In this chat, Dean, Patrick, and Leonard Lee discuss:

➡️ Analyst impressions of TM Forum DTW Ignite 2025 (4:20)
➡️ The state of agentic AI in telco transformation and modernization (7:55)
➡️ The state of telco modernization, service innovation, and monetization (11:35)
➡️ Where are we with network APIs and the market For them? (14:55)
➡️ Post-DTW Ignite 2025 recommendations for operators (18:25)

Remember to like, subscribe to the neXt Curve reThink channel. Also, follow neXt Curve by subscribing at www.next-curve.com. Also subscribe to the neXt Curve newsletter at https://bit.ly/3LbXVgZ and join the over 29,000 subscribers who get the tech and industry insights that matter on a monthly basis.

Check out Patrick's research at {Core Analysis} at www.coreanalysis.ca. Make sure to connect with him on LinkedIn to get a steady pulse of his thought leadership and perspectives on the industry and tech. 

Check out Dean's research and thought leadership at www.disruptiveanalysis.com. Make sure to connect with him on LinkedIn to get a steady pulse of his thought leadership and perspectives on the industry and tech. You can also follow Dean on Twitter (X) at @disruptivedean as well as on LinkedIn.

Chapters

• 4:20 Analyst impressions of TM Forum DTW Ignite 2025
• 7:55 The state of agentic AI in telco transformation and modernization
• 11:35 The state of telco modernization, service innovation, and monetization
• 14:55 Where are we with network APIs and the market For them?
• 18:25 Post-DTW Ignite 2025 recommendations for operators

Transcript

Leonard Lee: 0:10

Hi everyone. Welcome to this next Curve Rethink podcast episode where we break down the latest tech and industry events and happenings into the insights that matter. I'm Leonard Lee, executive Analyst at Next Curve. In this next curve rethink episode, we will be recapping, TM forums DT w Ignite 2025, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark about a couple of weeks ago. we'll be analyzing the state of Telco revolution and transformation, which are terms I think Dean really loves.

Dean Bubley: 0:42

long as you avoid the D word, you're okay. Okay.

Leonard Lee: 0:48

Okay. Yeah, we'll avoid that to the best of our ability, but, um,

Patrick Lopez: 0:52

it's gonna be a very short episode. We have to avoid everything that Dean doesn't like. Yeah. We might

Leonard Lee: 1:01

as well just add things right

Patrick Lopez: 1:03

now. We might just. I don't know. Can we talk about the weather? Yeah.

Leonard Lee: 1:08

Very. The galaxy. Yeah. Yes, for the 5G era. Okay. I have to throw that in. And I'm joined by the Notorious Dean, bubbly. Master Analyst at Disrupt. Ah, there you go. Disruptive analysis and the illustrious. Patrick Lopez, the Supreme Analyst at Core Analysis. Gentlemen, thank you so much for jumping on and I'm looking forward to having this discussion with you. Everything good. All good. Yes. And happy fourth. For what? For whatever it's worth to you. And the other side of the pond. Although I will attest that the British celebrate the f 4th of July holiday, for some reason, which I thought was really curious, Dean. So,

Dean Bubley: 1:54

there's a lot of Americans and just that we make sure that we get the date right. it's four slash seven, not seven slash four.

Leonard Lee: 2:03

Okay. Well before we get started, please remember to like, share, react, and comment on this episode. Also subscribe here on YouTube and on Bud Sprout to listen to us on your favorite podcast platform. Opinions and statements by my guests are that are own and don't reflect mine. Those of next curve, we're just trying to provide a open forum for discussion around all things tech and telco and digital. Disruption.

Patrick Lopez: 2:29

You got legalese. do you have a council that actually goes through your episode?

Leonard Lee: 2:34

Oh, come on Patrick. you know, I have to have some assurances, disclaimers, especially given some of the guests that I. Get on the show, you know, yourselves. So you know how you guys are.

Patrick Lopez: 2:48

You always get to get some deniability.

Leonard Lee: 2:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to watch out for you, Patrick., I know what you're like. hey, you know, let's get into this. I wanted to, well, number one, Dean, that remarkably, that was the first time we ever met in person.

Dean Bubley: 3:05

it was astonishing. I ended up right at the beginning of it, standing there and looking around.'cause we were right at the back of the room watching the keynotes and I was like, oh, that's Leonard. and Jeff was standing there as well. Yeah, we were, sort of getting the, critical density of telecom's loud mouths in one place at one time. Yeah, exactly. Just missing John Strand for the full quartet. I mean, given his Copenhagen, he probably wasn't far away either.

Leonard Lee: 3:31

Yeah, that's right. you were the first person that I bumped into of all people. And I mean, Lord knows we might see you at m WC one of these days right

Dean Bubley: 3:42

outside look looking, I, I got, I got very, very close last year, but I think actually going through the turns stars, it's pretty unlikely. Yeah. One of these days, Dean, if they drop their, mandatory app requirement, yeah, maybe, or maybe they smuggle me in through some back office VIP channel or something like that.

Leonard Lee: 4:01

There you go. And there's a hint right there. And Patrick, obviously we never got to spend as much time as we should have, but I did observe you getting super technical with the guys, at that, catalyst, the, IRA technologies, booth. and it was good to see you in action. So, but what I want to do here is really quickly get both of your. impressions on, the key themes. What popped for you this year at DTW and you know, Dean, I don't know if you tracked this event at all, so, but you know, I'm sure At the least you have a first impression of

Dean Bubley: 4:34

The event. Yeah, because I was only there for day one. I had another event in Dublin the following day. So I was just sort of did a bit of a flying visit. but I thought it was generally pretty upbeat and I thought the people there were a lot more positive about TM Forum than they had been for a few years. And there just seemed to be a lot more enthusiasm around the things they're doing autonomous networks and, the sort of ODA framework they've got. Yeah. It just seems to be a little bit more, here and now, whereas I look at some of the other network, API stuff. Particularly ones for exposure to external developers. Yeah. And I'm starting to think actually that the TM Forum, internal APIs within Telcos Yeah. Is a prerequisite before all the external stuff. Makes sense. and so it felt much more positive than the stuff going on. there was perhaps a little bit. As every, in everything oversaturation of ai, but we sort of expect that at the moment. I'm running my own AI event next week, so I, yeah, I'm in no position to talk, but, yeah, it was, quite, an eye opener. It's a nice venue as well, which helps.

Leonard Lee: 5:40

Yeah, a bit of a greenhouse though. But Patrick, what about you?

Patrick Lopez: 5:44

Yeah, look, Tim Forum. The longest time has been for me, like the O-S-S-B-S-S event. The event where progressively over the years, there were talks and efforts towards, having networks that were more intelligent and more automated. And really, until now, until, when you talk about. AI until you talk about self-optimizing network and until you have basically, automation, through, data, it was mostly stock in the sense that, you wanted to automate something. It was like Java scripting To get to where we at now, you had to reach like a level of maturity and the level of, technical, growth within the industry, that wasn't there, right? So now that you have like more cloud native functions, now that you have more virtualization layers, now that you have cloud tools such as chef Puppet, et cetera, now you actually can believably. Think of network getting more automated. mm-hmm. So, for me, that's what I get from people actually being a bit about, the DCW event this year. Is that like actually everything that DCW has been talking about for the last 10 years, it's actually. It cannot feels that it's coming to fruition. So that's why people have a reason to actually be, enthusiastic about the direction of the show and the industry.

Leonard Lee: 7:23

Yeah. I thought it seemed a little bit more grounded. I didn't spend a lot of time in the sessions. I was roaming around the exhibition floor and also checking out the catalysts, talking to a lot of the teams that, put those catalyst projects together. And, I think there's some great learning going on and it was good to see the progress. I would say discovery. I don't know what you and gentlemen felt, but it still seems like we continue to be in discovery mode. obviously this agen AI is this new thing that's been introduced over the course of the last six months, and now folks are graduating from the previous. cycles of generative AI applications to now looking at, what does EENT mean, right? I think there's still, we're still in POC mode though. Is the feel feeling that I got. I don't know what you gentlemen thought.

Dean Bubley: 8:21

I think on ag, yes, everyone's said this, but then I, I've got that at a bunch of events that I've been to recently. I think one of the things I took away from Tier Forum is that fairly uniquely amongst these industry associations, they are agnostic on fixed versus mobile networks. Whereas obviously GSMA or broadband forum or one or the other. I think the interesting thing there is you walk around and there were people talking about, smart home and fixed broadband services and there were other people talking about sort of mobile and whether it was monetizing 5G and all the usual stuff there, but it seems to be a lot less, driven by. Trying to monetize our side at the opposite, at the expense of the other side. Which I think is quite valuable. But also without, without overdoing the convergence rhetoric either, it was just saying, look, there's a bunch of stuff out there. I think, I dunno if I saw anyone talk about satellite, but that, you can imagine it fitting into the same, actually, no, I did speak to someone on satellite, I

Patrick Lopez: 9:26

think.

Dean Bubley: 9:26

Yeah. And so it was one of those events which was fairly agnostic in terms of the underlying network technology, which was nice. but on AgTech, no. I see that cropping up at a bunch of events, and discussions I have with briefings with vendors. I was a sub C fiber event. A week or so earlier, and there were people talking about, here's a gen AI use case for fiber operations for sub sea operations.

9:51

Yeah.

Dean Bubley: 9:51

and so, again, it was proof of concept, but it was, yeah, the, there's big things that are going on the right direction. The other thing is, I had a couple of discussions about what is needed to make all that real. For example, in that scenario, how do you. look after the security and identity of agents. So if you've got your AI talking to another ai you gonna have the security architecture around that and people are already having those conversations. Patrick, any thoughts?

Patrick Lopez: 10:20

Ai, as you say, is pretty much in proof of concept, which is a good thing because when I think of automation and when I think of agents and when I think of autonomous networks, um, I get scared. not by internet or the robots taking over. I just get scared because like for me, you automate well, something that you operate well.

10:43

Yeah.

Patrick Lopez: 10:43

and you operate well, something that you've been operating for a long time. Mm-hmm. the networks are changing much faster than they have had in the last. 20 years.

10:54

Yeah.

Patrick Lopez: 10:54

so we haven't had that much time, to actually operate well, a number of the functions that are being dropped into the networks. Mm-hmm. and trying to automate something for which you haven't observed all the limits and Which you haven't identified all, uh, ABER behavior. it can lead to catastrophic, results. Mm-hmm. So I think, agen AI is a good buzz word for everyone to, have, little, routines I think at the end of the day, there's going to be a lot more, human augmentation, let's say mm-hmm. Of task, rather than autonomous, or true autonomous networks.

Leonard Lee: 11:34

Yeah. This year it felt like. There was a lot of focus on autonomous, the, the network aspect of it. Right. So the lower level stuff. Yep. network orchestration management versus the BSS stuff. Um, previous years, there was a lot of talk about BSS, and, the tiers above it, right? Whether you want to call it, you know, the CRM. what was your, what were your impressions there?

Dean Bubley: 12:04

I don't wanna, I think there's fundamentally, an awareness that if you want to sell more stuff to end users, you have to do product development. Hmm. And as a telco, product development primarily involves doing something with a network, even if it's building applications on top of it. And so unless you've got new stuff to sell, there's a limit to what you can do with BSS beyond, improving your customer service maybe automating some of it. But fundamentally, revenue comes from not really fiddling around with bundles and packages. it comes from having new stuff to sell. Which means doing stuff to the network.

12:41

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Lopez: 12:43

Yeah. basically that's research. That's pure innovation, right? not every network operator is well equipped to do it, although the cost of doing it is going down, because now if you have a cloud native network, you can try things more easily, and you can do that in an environment that is protected before you roll out. So that's good. But If you look at, The focus of network operators, at least this year between, monetizing and cost reduction. the opportunity for monetization 5G are still, fixed wireless access and that's probably the most successful, let's say new. Service that has emerged from 5G. But besides that, there's not a lot of new services or new products that are emerging. So, but on the other hand, cost reduction remains. for everyone a big effort and Biggest cost for network operators beside, on one hand it's CapEx and it's that, it's the radios that's the biggest lump. And then it's people, it's having a lot of people, that are doing, a lot of valuable work. But if you look at, cloud native companies, it takes a lot less people to do some of the work that they're doing.

Dean Bubley: 13:57

Yes, the part of the CapEx is in the ran part of it is in digging up the road for fiber as well, and OLTs on the fixed side. But I think actually one of the interesting things I'm seeing is primarily on the fixed side, but mobile's talking about it as well is things like network as a service, and a move there towards whether it's, for enterprise I also see beneath the surface, more interest in wholesale and open access models. There's a bit more there. Multi-tenancy where the customer is another service provider,

Leonard Lee: 14:29

right?

Dean Bubley: 14:30

Of some sort rather than necessarily the end customer. And I think that's been a missing part of the puzzle in a lot of areas for a long time. You've got individual conferences on MVNOs and MV E and stuff like that, I think that. there's a bit of a disconnect sometimes in the marketplace where everyone assumes that the customer must always be, or the consumer of things like APIs and capabilities must always be either a long tail app developer or maybe an enterprise developer, whereas in fact, the two audiences that I. Top of the list are the internal product and software development teams within the operator itself. and then other operators, they almost like we, or in finance, you call market counterparties. And I think that TM forum is slightly better positioned to cater to those audiences than say GSMA is at the moment.

Leonard Lee: 15:26

Interesting insight. Yeah. And I think also a certain class of developers though, I think maybe the estimation of how many, what the population of developers, will be, for network APIs. I think, Much larger than what it'll actually be. I think, at the lower levels of, let's call it the solution tier, whatever it is that you're trying to, ultimately a developer at the highest order is going to try to go to market with. you know you're gonna have a lot more developers at that level than down at the network, API level, right? Yeah. that's not to say that there isn't a lot of value that can be. Had, at that network, API level. But I think that's that transition and thinking that still hasn't happened yet. Right. so you're making a good point, Dean, a good observation as well. You have any thoughts on that? Patrick,

Patrick Lopez: 16:17

well,

Leonard Lee: 16:17

network APIs, our favorite topic of the

Patrick Lopez: 16:20

Yeah, it's a train that I've been following, I don't know, like the real difficulty with network API is just. Finding really what's valuable for third parties in an operator network.

16:32

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Lopez: 16:32

and today, from what I see, and I don't have, an exhaustive view of the market space, but it looks like a lot of it is geared towards, fraud, avoidance. Mm-hmm. user identity, little bit of location services.

16:46

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Lopez: 16:47

And you know, if the network APIs and the whole API gateway movement and camera end up, creating a marketplace for that, that's good. it's also probably a little disappointing. you would think that. Going forward, hopefully, some of the capacity of the network operator can be better sold, through, APIs. we've been talking about, Edge networks, For a long time. Right. But they're starting to develop. there are some practical applications that could be used there. And something that just said, there's probably also more useful network APIs between networks, that could be better, looked at, There's no reason when network. are overlapping over geography that you wouldn't get some level of best user experience, API, that would allow either carrier aggregation or even, roaming from one network to the other transparent to give the best signal. And there may be people are already to pay a premium for that. And, that will be. Operator to operator discovering basically what's the best connectivity option for a given user in a given location? so there are opportunities there. And, I think that as often In telecom, we're looking first at the technology, before looking at the possible users, to define what kind of, use case we're going to roll out.

Leonard Lee: 18:13

Yeah. It's because technology is so fun, right, Patrick?

Patrick Lopez: 18:16

For sure.

Leonard Lee: 18:19

And so is it, imagining things. but last question I was wondering, what do you think that the operators need to focus on coming out of TM Forum, DTW Ignite 2025, what should they take away and what do you think will land next year? Patrick, why don't you kick us off here?

Patrick Lopez: 18:42

Alright. well there's progress in automation. There is now, some fairly complex use case that can be not only demonstrated, but actually rolled out if you have, the right, DNA or if you have the right technological base, and the right technological base. It's pretty much the same for. Every cloud native application, I talk about open, ran, AI ran is the same at the end of the day. You need fiber. You need fiber. you need, a virtualization layer, on top of your, hardware. you need hardware that is as undifferentiated as possible. you need, an orchestration, capability that's able to distribute workloads, geographically within your network, to be able to, flex, with the demand if you have that. Then on top of that, doing a level of automations that allow you to either optimize, or provide, better service, to specific kind of users. Mm-hmm. We spoke about slicing for longest time. Right.

Leonard Lee: 19:45

yeah,

Patrick Lopez: 19:46

none of the slicing really was possible. Unless, you had that base that I talked about and now you start to see operators that have that, Oh yeah. you have to have like a toolkit to do the sophisticated use case that we mentioned. and now, basically, having, algorithmic capabilities that allows you to identify patterns, and to basically react to it, as close to real time as possible or even anticipate it, to be able to either optimize your network or adjust the network to the demand. Or create, connectivity services that are adapted to specific, use case or specific users, all of that. you can see it, right? I mean, yeah, we're like the promise of 5G from seven years ago we're coming of age right now.

Leonard Lee: 20:33

Yeah.

Dean Bubley: 20:34

Yeah. What about you, Dean? I would like to see both operators and also the vendor community, thinking more about the outside world and the impact that has on the various of the systems that they're deploying. Give a couple examples of that is there was a small booth that I saw of one vendor there, which had a very, niche product, but they essentially looked at the impact of things like power outages on the network. And they had a feed into an adjacent system from power companies that said that they were having issues with electricity supply in particular areas Provide slicing quality of service networks as a service as much as you like. But if there's a grid failure on the electricity side in a particular area, then your number of nines you've got is irrelevant because there's no power supply unless you've got battery backup. Another thing that relates to that is what else is going on in the real world in terms of the way we as consumers or businesses are using ai. Or software generally, or devices. Where are we using, when I talk about things like, well, this is all very great for wireless, but does it work indoors or does it work on a hot day or when it's snowing? But also, we have to think about, we are all using AI tools these days evermore. Yeah, probably, we're talking about agentic here. Probably all three of us use. Various, tools to generate, content or summarize discussions we've had. Hmm. I sort of made a, hypothetical post yesterday, saying, well, what happens when we all have our own agents negotiating our prices and service plans, for example? does the, customer service function of an operator sometimes become an A at some point become an agent service where essentially, hi, this is chat GPT calling on behalf of Dean. I'd like to renegotiate the contract and the plan I've had 37 million conversations like this in the last month and I reckon you discount. Let's cut to the chase and sign on the dotted line. by the time we talk about some of these things coming to fruition 2030, it's not just B2B and B2C, it's gonna be B two ai. And so again, this is like an external thing you can add in, a lot of regulatory trends that are happening Geopolitical. I would say the energy side of it, climate change, you can name, you have a whole list. at the moment, sometimes I still getting the impression that a lot of this community is very internally focused on we wanna make sure our cloud native functions work. We've got our vision.

23:12

Yeah.

Dean Bubley: 23:12

We stand set together. But actually the world isn't static. And I think that we don't necessarily always look to, what the future gonna look like by the time we have all this wonderful software to enable us to interact with it.

Leonard Lee: 23:24

Yeah. No, those are good points. Thank you gentlemen. Thank you so much. And I appreciate you both jumping on, to share your thoughts on, DTW. Ignite. Geez. I go to so many conferences as you do. I forget the name, some of these conferences. So, a lot of respect for the folks at TM Forum. You guys put on a great program. Okay, sorry about messing it up here, but, DT DW Ignite, it was a great conference and it was great meeting both of you there. And so why don't you both take a brief moment to. tell the next curve audience, how to get in touch with you and, maybe briefly some of the great work that you guys are doing.

Dean Bubley: 24:06

Easiest way to reach me is usually on LinkedIn. where I, I've got a regular stream of posts and also a newsletter. and I engage with vendors, operators, regulators, investors and others on, advising on what's next in telecoms. and also related areas of policy and cloud and so on, and do various speaking engagements and written reports and internal workshops and studies. So, please, connect with me on LinkedIn.

Patrick Lopez: 24:33

Very good. Connect with me on LinkedIn. send me an email, Patrick Lopez at core analysis ca. I was very fortunate to be invited to be a member of, the board of director of our organization called, the Center. For Next generation network, in Canada, I'm in Canada. Sangen is basically funded by the federal government to help, small and medium enterprise in Canada to, have access and to discover how networks, are evolving and how to use, next generation networks for, new use cases. I just want to take the opportunity to put a little spotlight there because it's good, in our capabilities to be able to give back to the community and well, in my case, give back to Canada. So, since it was Canada Day, Which is, July 1st, not seven one. Dean, earlier this week, I wanted to, take the opportunity, to flag that out. Thank you.

Leonard Lee: 25:23

Okay, wonderful. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me here on this podcast and, hope you have a great weekend. To our audience, please subscribe to our podcast, which will be featured on the next Curve YouTube channel. check out the audio version on buzzsprout or find us on your favorite podcast platform. Also, subscribe to the next curve research portal@www.next curve.com for the tech and industry insights that matter. Gentlemen, have a great weekend and thank you so much for jumping on and sharing your insights. Thank you. Take care. Thanks.

Patrick Lopez: 25:56

Thanks, Dean. See you soon, guys.

Leonard Lee: 25:58

Happy fourth.