- DTW Ignite will take place in Copenhagen in June, a wonderful city
- The show is a meeting point for many Tier -1 CEOs and Cloud executives
- The TM forum seems to be more relevant than ever with AI and network automation
DTW Ignite, Copenhagen – I have avoided the annual event of the TM Forum via OSS and BSS for years. It sounded incredibly boring to talk about telecommunications standards and catalyst projects (yawn).
But of course everything you resist stay. And at the beginning of this week I was on a plane to Copenhagen for the annual DTW Ignite event of the TM Forum.
And … it was surprisingly great.
A magical city
Copenhagen botanical gardens (Copenhagen gardens over Linda Hardesty/Fierce Network)
First of all, Copenhagen is a magical city in June. His botanical gardens alone are worth the trip. There is no entry fee and you can simply stroll through wonderful gardens as long as you want. I took a few photos that reminded me of idealized European gardens that were captured in prints that my grandmother hung on her walls of the living room.
The city is also full of friendly and funny people.
My guide on a channel tour spoke about various kings of Denmark, all of whom are called either King Christian or King Frederick. These are the only legally approved names of the king. The Swedes are the arch enemy of the Danes and there is a statue of one of the kings of Denmark in the royal court. The king rides on a horse and the butt of the horse is Swedish (intentionally).
Come in telecommunications
I could continue and Copenhagen tours over my day, but this is finally a business-to-business publication for telecommunications. If the DTW Ignite Conference was added, this was also good.
It is a great forum to meet people in the telecommunications industry and feel a bit like a mini-mobile world congress. The DTW show is expected to count around 4,500 participants.
Before the show, Joe Cumello, SVP and General Manager of Cienas Blue Planet said that DTW was a great show to meet customers. “We go because all of our customers go,” he said. “We will perform 30-40 meetings there. So that I can travel to 30-40 places all over the world, it is really inefficient. I could see them all at DTW, so it's a great forum.”
And it turned out that the focus was not strict on OSS/BSS.
Horse statue in Royal Courtyard, Copenhagen (Copenhagen -König statue about Linda Hardesty/Fierce Network)
Andy Tiller, EPP from TM Forum for Products and Services, said: “There is a large ecosystem on the IT page of the industry. However, the show is also more relevant on the network page, as the network is increasingly software and you need a much better view.”
Tiller said the goal of autonomous networks has also aroused new interest. “It made the TM forum much more relevant for the network part of our industry,” he said.
Five automation layers
The TM forum has given five autonomy layers that are from level 1, in which there is a certain automation, but still human interventions are still necessary, up to level 5 in which the network is completely autonomous, and is managed and optimized itself without human participation.
According to the website of the TM Forum, many telecommunications operators in 2025, level 4 (a state of high autonomy) strive to achieve a strategic goal. A handful of units have already reached this milestone, with the China Mobile and Tsinghua University citing the indictment at the end of last year. Vivo in Brazil followed in January 2025.
Tiller said that level 4 networks are currently a big focus because they are available, but level 5 networks are still “quite far away”.
Apart from IT issues and network automation, there was a lot of focus on AI.
And I noticed that the European telecommunications companies were obsessed with sovereign clouds, which is not a big focus in the United States, but of course the EU consists of several countries that have the desire to restrict their government data within their own limits.
An executive who wanted to remain anonymous said that the Trump government was even more interested in sovereign clouds because the European governments are afraid that the US government could force American public cloud providers to hand over sensitive data.
Start all of our reporting from this year DTW Ignite Show here.