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TM Forum and FIWARE Join Forces to Speed the Development of New Smart City Services

Collaboration delivers standard REST-based APIs for enabling open sustainable ecosystems

MORRISTOWN, NJ—November 19, 2015—TM Forum, the global industry association for digital business, today announced that it is working with FIWARE, an open cloud-based platform for the creation and delivery of applications and services, to deliver the key building blocks for enabling and connecting Smart City ecosystems.

TM Forum is supporting FIWARE NGSI REST-based APIs for real-time access to contextual information for cities. This enables more efficient management of municipal services in areas such as mobility, water, waste, energy and environmental management, and also paves the way for the development of smart applications by third parties.

“Valuable real-time information will be shared across vertical management solutions currently working as silos, while at the same time fueling new innovative services when published as real-time open data,” said Juanjo Hierro, coordinator and chief architect of FIWARE & CTO Industrial IoT, Telefónica. Cities can therefore make better decisions based on data from multiple sources, such as real-time environmental data and traffic management patterns.

In turn, TM Forum’s Ecosystem APIs, including Product Catalog, Product Ordering and Product Inventory, will be incorporated within the specifications and open source reference implementation of the FIWARE Business Framework. This Framework enables the management and the monetization of different kinds of digital assets involving multiple partners. TM Forum’s lightweight REST-based APIs have been crowdsourced from within TM Forum’s diverse membership over the past three years and leverage more than 25 years of TM Forum’s complex management systems expertise in billing, catalog management, service level agreements and policy. FIWARE will launch the new Business Framework, powered by TM Forum’s Ecosystem APIs, at Mobile World Congress 2016.

“Leveraging TM Forum’s APIs and FIWARE’s real-time city data creates a vibrant environment for third party developers to thrive within an open innovative ecosystem,” said Joann O’Brien, vice president of Industry Collaboration, TM Forum.

Collaboration in Practice

Most recently, the collaboration between TM Forum and FIWARE was showcased at the Smart City Hackathon during TM Forum Live! 2015 in Nice, France, where FIWARE real-time city data was used to create the two winning applications: an automatized cleaning solution for public spaces and green areas, and a traffic diversion application that visually displays localized pollution data to drivers based on a clustered CO2 sensor algorithm.

The Hackathon was a significant stepping stone in the formation of TM Forum’s Smart City Forum. “TM Forum’s Smart City Forum will grow to include 100+ leading smart cities and governments, the top 10 global Smart City research groups, 10 Smart City Innovation Centers and hundreds of suppliers, service providers and international bodies from wider smart city ecosystems,” said Carl Piva, vice president of Strategic Programs & Leader of the Smart City Forum. “The combination of our business-focused APIs that make it easy to create flexible urban digital ecosystems and FIWARE’s contextual APIs that can access real-time city data, will make it faster and easier to create applications that can be replicated across cities.”

Patrice Slupowski, vice president of Digital Innovation for Orange, further elaborates: “The combined use of TM Forum’s business management APIs and the FIWARE platform will facilitate the creation of interoperable ecosystems of services for smart cities. In Orange, we are great believers of standard APIs, and we are very optimistic that the FIWARE Business Framework will help to create a solid basis for a creative and powerful ‘Economy of Data.’”

This collaboration will enable cities who have joined the global Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) initiative – which looks to FIWARE NGSI as one of its three cornerstone mechanisms – to boost the creation of sustainable smart city ecosystems by bringing in the kind of digital infrastructures needed to develop the ‘Economy of Data’ vision, based on the fundamental requirements of transparency, security and trust.

“Cities prioritize sustainable economic development above all, but it has become clear that in order to achieve this, we need a harmonized global smart city market that connects to local realities. Common standards, which are practical and easy to use, are key for cities that want to be open and agile,” says Martin Brynskov, chair of the OASC initiative. The OASC initiative comprises more than 75 cities from 15 countries and aims to create a sustainable global market for smart city applications through the adoption of common APIs, data models and platforms, and by promoting them as de facto standards based on widespread implementation.

The next stage of this industry collaboration will include the development of Open Source Charging and Revenue Sharing components integrated with TM Forum’s Billing, Product Inventory and Usage Management API-derived components. These APIs will enable significantly improved capabilities to manage automated billing and payment supporting pay per use, even when occurring in a complex multi-partner context.

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