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ServiceNow reveals how its Ready for ODA journey enabled true multivendor interoperability - reducing costs and development time by over 50%.
My ODA Unboxed Story: How ServiceNow achieved Ready for ODA through realising true multivendor interoperability
ServiceNow® accelerates and assures digital transformation to fuel growth for CSPs. By automating workflows, CSPs create great experiences and boost productivity across customers, employees, and operations. Ultimately, this defines a modern digital telco—uniting ordering and assurance on one platform for a seamless experience and visibility across the journey.
ServiceNow aligned with ODA to realize true multivendor interoperability for their customers and accelerate hyperautomation across their business processes for tangible business value. ODA has been adopted across their Sales and Order Management, Customer Service Management, Network Inventory, Network and Service Operations Management products.
Our Sales and Order Management, Customer Service Management, and Network Inventory, Network and Service Operations Management products have achieved TM Forum Ready for ODA status.
Built ground‑up on ServiceNow’s secure, AI‑native enterprise platform, these products leverage our deep telecom domain expertise and are fully aligned with TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) principles. Each capability is delivered as modular, composable components, enabling CSPs to adopt, scale, and evolve their digital operations with agility.
By leveraging powerful ServiceNow platform services—such as workflow orchestration, IntegrationHub, data management, and AI‑driven automation—our ODA‑aligned solutions enable CSPs to seamlessly manage sales, service, and network operations on a single, unified, secure, AI‑native platform, accelerating transformation while reducing complexity.
Aligning our telecom industry solutions with TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) is foundational to our strategy. By adhering to the ODA framework, we reinforce trust with our customers and strategic partners, assuring them that our composable, plug‑and‑play solutions are built on open, industry‑aligned standards that enable seamless integration and true multi‑vendor interoperability.
For us, ODA serves as a modern architectural blueprint that guides the design of flexible, future‑ready enterprise architectures. This alignment allows us to simplify integration, avoid vendor lock‑in, and accelerate hyper‑automation across sales, service, and network domains, empowering CSPs to rapidly adapt and innovate in an increasingly dynamic and competitive market.
At ServiceNow, we launched our first telecom industry solution in the second half of 2020 with a clear commitment to build TM Forum ODA‑aligned, modular, and composable software components on our modern, secure, AI‑native enterprise platform. From day one, ODA alignment has been central to our strategy, enabling sales, service, and network operations to be delivered seamlessly on a single unified platform.
This consolidation approach has unlocked measurable business outcomes for our customers by simplifying architectures, accelerating automation, and delivering consistent experiences across domains. By leveraging industry‑aligned APIs, standardized data models, and reusable workflows, customers can rapidly innovate while reducing operational complexity.
Key tangible benefits realized by our customers include:
By aligning with TMF’s Open Digital Architecture, we deliver real, quantifiable business value, empowering CSPs to operate faster, smarter, and more efficiently in an increasingly competitive market.
As TM Forum standards continue to evolve, one of the key challenges we encountered early in our ODA journey was interpreting specific architectural and design principles and effectively mapping them to the ServiceNow platform’s data model and native capabilities. Translating ODA concepts into practical, scalable implementations required careful alignment between industry standards and platform‑driven innovation.
We addressed these challenges through close collaboration with TM Forum’s architecture and product teams, engaging in continuous dialogue to clarify intent, validate designs, and refine our approach. This partnership enabled us to bridge gaps, accelerate learning, and confidently adopt ODA as our reference architecture—ensuring our solutions are not only standards‑compliant, but also pragmatic, scalable, and enterprise‑ready.
This collaborative, iterative approach has strengthened our ODA adoption and reinforced our ability to deliver modular, composable, and future‑proof telecom solutions aligned with TM Forum best practices.
Our product and engineering teams have built deep expertise in TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) through a combination of continuous learning, active industry engagement, and hands‑on implementation.
Teams regularly upskill on the latest TMF design patterns and standards, participate in ODA‑focused training programs, and actively contribute to TM Forum Catalyst initiatives aligned to our product portfolio. This structured learning foundation is complemented by extensive hands‑on experience, gained through the design and development of ODA‑aligned components and open APIs over time.
As a result of this practical, build‑led approach, we have successfully published and certified multiple TM Forum Gen5 Open APIs, along with several compliant components—demonstrating applied expertise beyond theory.
ServiceNow’s Telecom Industry Vertical remains deeply committed to the continuous evolution of ODA knowledge, closely tracking new standards and translating them into modern, innovative, and composable solutions. This sustained investment in skills and real‑world implementation enables us to deliver ODA‑aligned, future‑ready solutions that drive measurable value for our customers.
Find out more about Ready for ODA here.
