Prestigious award recognizes industry leaders that make significant contributions to accelerating digital transformation

Boston, USA; London, England; Zagreb, Croatia; Ottawa, Canada — May 31, 2017 – The Agile Fractal Grid announced today that it and its co-champions Milton Keynes and Dublin City, and its participants BT, BearingPoint, EXFO, and GDi were selected as winners in the TM Forum Catalyst Awards 2017 when the “Smart City on the Edge” won the “Outstanding Performance in the Catalyst Program.” The Agile Fractal Grid was also recognized earlier in the week before a packed crowd on Monday, May 15th at the prestigious Palais de la Méditerranée as the Smart City Innovator of the Year during the Excellence Awards.

TM Forum announced the Catalyst Award winners at its flagship TM Forum Live! 2017 conference at the Acropolis in Nice, France, at the conclusion of the Catalyst Competition on Wednesday, May 17th.  This Catalyst applies Edge and Fog Computing principles on Smart City Data Hubs to improve the efficiency of city operations by situational, decentralized decision-making and pushing intelligence from central data hubs to the local loop of programmable edge devices (e.g., IoT gateways and sensors).

The Agile Fractal Grid is a shared infrastructure business model (concept) for migration of electric power distribution to a decentralized control similar to the style of the Internet for improving reliability, resiliency, and security of electric power grid.  It is a platform of platforms supported by the Infonova R6 Digital Ecosystem Orchestrator provided by BearingPoint as the BSS; the OSS is made up of the GDi Ensemble system and the EXFO systems and ontological integration.

The role of BT was to develop the overall architectural framework to deliver Smart City capabilities, determining how best to leverage Data Hubs together with Edge and Fog Computing principles to improve the efficiency of Smart City operations.

The role of the BearingPoint was to provide and outline how best to leverage its Infonova R6 software to enable the partnering, orchestration and monetization of the Smart City partners and users.

The role of the GDi OSS Solution modules in the overall concept was to translate the customer orders to a technical fulfillment process instance and to register resources and services through centralized data repository. GDi represented a technical backbone to the complete application ecosystem, both in the domain of service fulfilment and also service assurance.

The role of the EXFO was to provide and outline how best to leverage EXFO’s and Ontology’s software assets to deliver a truly comprehensive view across physical, virtual and hybrid networks, delivering real-time monitoring and management of next generation networks.

EXFO’s comprehensive, dynamic topology modeling solution—EXFO Ontology—provided a real-time 3D model that displayed network, service and subscriber performance of the Agile Fractal Grid infrastructure. EXFO Ontology displayed the results of automated root cause and service impact analyses, which delivered unique insights into customer service experience by providing the most relevant, actionable data from all dimensions: network, service and subscriber.

Congratulations to this team for its achievement in the 2017 TM Forum Catalyst Awards. Operational and solution excellence, innovation, and digital industry leadership exemplify the winners of this prestigious award. Our sincere congratulations to this team for accelerating digital transformation and its commitment to the Forum, our members and the industry as a whole.

Nik Willetts, CEO, TM Forum

TM Forum’s Catalyst Awards recognizes diverse members within TM Forum’s community that are making significant contributions to advancing critical best practices and standards for the benefit of entire industries and digital ecosystems. Since 2007, TM Forum’s Awards have recognized the world’s leading companies for their innovative achievements spanning digital transformation, business and IT agility, customer centricity, cross-industry partnering and collaboration, the Internet of Everything, and product and services innovation.

The Agile Fractal Grid offers a platform of platforms for digital services to areas that embrace the economies of the shared infrastructure business model concept.  Its digital service partners provide advanced communications services, decentralized electric power managed services, hyperscale computing services, and community services for public safety, education, and hospitals.  It also offers Cornucopia, its constellation of incubators allowing the economic development groups within rural communities the ability for entrepreneurs to launch their own platform businesses, makerspaces to stimulate micromanufacturing, the interdisciplinary expansion of the arts, and a social scene popular with young people everywhere.

BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consultancy with European roots and a global reach. The company operates in three units: Consulting, Solutions and Ventures. Consulting covers the advisory business; Solutions provides the tools for successful digital transformation, regulatory technology and advanced analytics; Ventures drives the financing and development of start-ups. BearingPoint’s clients include many of the world’s leading companies and organizations. The firm has a global consulting network with more than 10,000 people and supports clients in over 75 countries, engaging with them to achieve measurable and sustainable success.

GDi (www.gdi.net) is an innovative and award-winning provider of applied technology solutions, with over 25 years of successful growth and over 1,000 customers. Their proven, industry focused family of GDi Ensemble OSS, Fulfilment, and Workforce solutions are used by major communication service providers throughout Europe and the World.  GDi products are being used to manage assets, resources, and operations within infrastructure industry and commercial business as well as government.  GDi is particularly well known for leadership in the field of Operations Support Systems (OSS), Decision Support Systems (DSS), Cloud Computing and Geoinformation Systems (GIS).

EXFO develops smarter network test, monitoring and analytics solutions for the world’s leading communications service providers, network equipment manufacturers and webscale companies. Since 1985, we’ve worked side by side with our customers in the lab, field, data center, boardroom and beyond to pioneer essential technology and methods for each phase of the network lifecycle. Our portfolio of test orchestration and real-time 3D analytics solutions turn complex into simple and deliver business-critical insights from the network, service and subscriber dimensions. Most importantly, we help our customers flourish in a rapidly transforming industry where “good enough” testing, monitoring and analytics just aren’t good enough anymore—they never were for us, anyway. For more information, visit EXFO.com and follow us on the EXFO Blog.

Press Contacts:

Agile Fractal Grid Inc. Contact
Chuck Speicher

Tel: +1-978-500-0956

BT  Contact
Mr Mike Witts
Head of Corporate and External Communications

Tel: 07795 986120 

BearingPoint Contact
For more information, please visit:


GDI Contact
Neven Bahtijarevic
Marketing Department


EXFO Contact
Anne Douville, PR & Media Specialist

Tel: +1-418-683-0913, ext. 23463

About TM Forum

TM Forum is an association of over 850 member companies generating US$2 trillion in revenue and serving five billion customers across 180 countries. We drive collaboration and collective problem-solving to maximize the business success of communication and digital service providers and their ecosystem of suppliers around the world. Today, our focus is on supporting members as they navigate their unique digital transformation journeys, providing practical and proven assets and tools to accelerate execution and platforms to facilitate collaborative problem solving and innovation. Learn more at www.tmforum.org.

Press contact

Alexander Bock
Global Senior Manager Communications
Telephone: +49 89 540338029