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Thousands of companies

manufacture millions of

devices for various

“Smart” scenarios,

including Smart Cities,

Smart Homes, Smart

Grid, Smart Factories,

Smart Agriculture, and Smart Security and

Surveillance. Fuelled by the growth in 5G,

compute at the edge, IoT and context

specific Artificial Intelligence (AI), these

new technologies promise a surge in new

innovative services and new revenue

streams. The 4th industrial revolution is

transforming industries from traditional

to smart; using new technologies to deliver

smart end-to-end solutions. There are

however barriers to realise this at scale

in a cost effective and secure way.

New disruptive business models, and

relationships between the multiple players

in the market, are challenging the existing

vendor relationships, while fragmentation

of the IoT market across technologies and

industry verticals is creating many

different solutions to address similar

industry problems. This fragmentation

spans across existing and new ecosystem

players, from hardware providers and

software vendors to solution providers and

system integrators. These smart solutions

are integrating a raft of existing and rapidly

emerging enabling technologies, such as

data analytics, AI, cloud compute,

LP-WAN, NB-IoT, LoRa and 5G all of which

have to be handled securely meeting the

need to conform to data protection and

privacy regulations such as GDPR.

THE REQUIRED EXPERIENCE For smart scenarios to be successful and

scalable they need to echo the Consumer

Digital Tsunami, where consumers expect

to browse, select, sometimes configure,

buy, receive and be charged for goods

and services online as “self-service”.

To achieve the expected shopping

cart and end-user experiences for scalable

smart scenarios, the following needs

to be resolved:

1. Removal of manual deployment steps

and achieving secure, automated

fulfilment and lifecycle management of

end-to-end solutions and their

components, such as IoT devices,

products, applications and services.

2. Easy creation and configuration of

new, smart market solutions made

up of multiple resources, services,

technical rules and business rules from

different partners.

3. Frictionless trading between different

organisations where the ecosystem

partners can be certain their technical

dependency rules are respected and

reflected within the shopping cart,

and where they can be sure of being

properly compensated for their

contribution according to their pricing.

4. Industry-agnostic repeatable patterns

to enable “plug-and-play” onboarding

of business partners and their services,

so that all industries can rapidly scale

and accelerate their smart offerings.

5. Provision of secure devices and

systems, with a traceable, federated

and automated supply chain.

6. Systems and tooling to allow product

managers to launch, manage and

monetise their new smart solutions.

A SECURE IOT SUPPLY CHAIN FOR CUSTOMER CERTAINTY

Until now, an end-user journey that lets

customers order, establish, maintain and

in-life manage IoT devices, from one to

billions, in a secure, automated way hasn’t

existed. This has led to complexity and

cost in large-scale industrial IoT solutions.

As a result, there’s pent up demand from

large enterprise customers needing secure

management of IoT at scale.

Responding to customer requirements,

BT has worked with its co-creation

partners to provide zero-touch device

connectivity, attestation, device

bootstrapping and device management

choices for customers to select in a

simple-to-use shopping cart experience.

It now only takes minutes to onboard a

multitude of IoT devices once they have

been installed and powered up. The

shopping cart offers full clarity of what will

be charged, and the customer portal

provides full in-life device management for

individual or groups of IoT devices. Cost

effective deployment and management

of millions of devices is now a reality

for IoT service providers and customers.

THE DIGITAL MARKETPLACE FOR IOT BUSINESS SERVICES

To develop a suitable solution, BT’s

Applied Research led the creation of the

Digital Business Marketplace (DBM)

project in TM Forum’s “Catalyst” program,

(https://www.tmforum.org/catalysts/

digital-business-marketplace/). A

collaboration environment where

companies can rapidly innovate and

prototype in a neutral, IP-protected

context. BT used its new zero-touch

patents, the Intel® Secure Device Onboard

(Intel® SDO) service, BearingPoint//

Beyond’s Infonova Digital Business

Partnering Platform, and Digiglu’s digital

self-service shopping cart experience to

offer the monetised deployment of secure,

zero-touch IoT products and services.

Delivered in a DevOps context in five

weeks during April to May 2019, phase 1 of

the DBM Catalyst delivered automated

partnering capabilities to deploy secure,

zero-touch IoT devices, eliminating the

laborious, cost-restrictive and security

risk-prone manual work required to

onboard and manage millions of IoT

devices in-life.

BT’s approach provided repeatable

patterns to enable vendors, service

providers and operators who want to

offer their products and services in a

secure and automated way. With these

repeatable patterns, more services can be

seamlessley onboarded to a zero-touch

A security services consortium requires IoT, 5G and AI with compute-at-the-edge to analyse HDTV camera feeds to determine threats and take appropriate actions.

When tool bearings vibrate, there is only 1ms to stop a lathe from damaging it’s precision blade. This reaction time requires IoT, private in-factory 5G and AI-/compute-at-the-edge decision making capabilities.

1Secure device onboarding leveraging Intel®

SDO. This zero- touch onboarding service enables devices to be provisioned at the point of installation, once it has been connected to the network and powered up, removing the need to pre-load at the time of manufacture. Intel® SDO helps construct a channel between the device and its management platform using an industry standard identity based on an Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) crypto key which is broadly supported by Intel® and Arm based IoT chipsets. Intel® SDO is further characterised by ‘late binding’ – the ability for customers to choose their target IoT device management platform, e.g. AWS IoT Device Management, Nokia Impact or Arm Pelion, at the time of or after installation. Late binding helps device manufacturers build to plan, rather than to order. It also enables secure and automated decommissioning and

ownership transfer traceability, reducing costs, inventory and supply cycle times.

2Secure, zero-touch orchestration utilises BT’s new

suite of IoT patents. Devices establish mutual trust with their device managers, or digital owners using hardware or software ‘roots-of-trust’ as the foundation of device establishment and lifecycle management. Zero-touch bootstrapping enables device owners to request a bootstrap for the device. This comprises of the firmware, operating system, credentials, protocols, applications and agents, all bound with installation instructions based on the device profile and the device management system. Zero-touch device management includes device reassignment and decommissioning.

3An abstracted frictionless partner trading ecosystem

enabled by BearingPoint//Beyond’s Infonova Digital

Business Platform. Available as-a-service from BT’s Cloud or AWS, each partner has full use of concept-to-cash and partnering business process capabilities. Partners model devices, and services, including fibre broadband, cloud compute, zero-touch attestation and zero-touch device management, along with the dependencies, business rules and offers. Resources and services can be offered using the platform, as can frictionless trading, automated and integrated supply chain fulfilment, and customer billing and partner settlement.

4End-to-end orchestration and digital

customer experience with self-service, using Digiglu’s technology framework. The customer experience provides a web interface, while orchestration uses containerization and micro-service technologies. The combination provide an agile way for offering and provisioning products, services and resources.

THE DBM CATALYST SHOWCASED THE FOLLOWING CAPABILITIES:

To scale to a trillion devices by 2035, security and provisioning automation barriers had to be overcome so that devices can be deployed with sufficient ROI. Given the diversity of IoT devices this had to be open and developed in partnership with the solution ecosystem so that any device hardware type (Intel or ARM) could be onboarded to any vendor’s device management system on premise or in the cloud.

A

Build and Ship SDO Enabled

Devices

B

Register Ownership to

Target Platform

C

Register Devices with SDO Server

D

SDO redirects Device to its

target Platform

E

Device Authenticated

and Provisioned

F

Device sends data to

IoT Platform

Device Manufacturer

SDO enable device & create Ownership

Voucher

Target Platform

SDO SDK

Register Ownership Voucher with SDO Service

Provision device

Load Ownership Voucher into

Target Platform

Onboard device

Data flows

SDO Rendezvous

Service

E

Device Installation and Provisioning

B C

DF

A SDO

The 4th industrial revolution Establishing, managing and maintaining connected devices, securely at internet scale for industry 4.0 requires a new approach to the supply chain – a Digital Business Marketplace.

services catalogue, and customers can

then select plug-and-play IoT devices and

applications in a shopping cart, to be paid

for as up-front fees, monthly subscriptions

or day-by-day usage.

DBM CATALYST IMPLICATIONS, OBSERVATIONS AND IMPACTS

BT’s patented inventions are now being

downstreamed as they have significant

cost savings potential. With some analysts

projecting 80 billion devices by 2025,

using this zero-touch approach could

equate to a saving of over 14 million

person-years of effort. Cost-savings alone

provide a sound business case, but,

crucially, increased security of endpoints is

also of paramount importance.

Maintenance and patching work, which

currently requires site visits, can now be

undertaken securely and remotely,

dramatically saving as much as 25% of the

IoT lifecycle costs, as well as avoiding the

dangers of exposing the devices to

tampering, cloning and hacking scenarios

that may occur during manual

maintenance.

DBM CATALYST PHASE 2 Phase 2 of the DBM work built on the

automated partnering and IoT device

orchestration of Phase 1, and also

leveraged the TM Forum’s Catalyst

Programme. The team for Phase 2 was

extended with the collaboration from

Accenture, AWS and Verizon, and

demonstrated how a complete suite of

products and services can be ordered and

securely delivered from a self-service

shopping cart. To support the enhanced

phase 2 scenarios, the suite of products

and services was much broader and

included BT zero-touch orchestrated and

Intel® SDO-enabled IoT devices, sensors

and actuators, AI, universal Customer

Premises Equipment (uCPE) with

Software-Defined Wide Area Networking

(SD-WAN), Virtualized Network Functions

(VNFs), cloud and communications

services spanning Fibre Broadband, Wi-Fi,

and public and private LTE. These

scenarios covered business supply chains,

with combinations of suppliers, resellers

and partners, to enable a range of

solutions for Smart Retail, Smart Factory,

Smart Office and Smart Grid, delivered via

self-service or sales agent channels.

Together with the capabilities to

manage in-life operations, monetization

and settlement, phase 2 of the DBM

Catalyst provided the patterns to enable

product managers from vertical industries

to leverage the Digital Business

Marketplace to shape, deliver and manage

Smart offerings, such as IoT-enabled

preventative maintenance services or

repeatable Smart Factory offerings, for

their vertical industry customers.

The phase 2 team has agreed to

remain active and is planning to showcase

further Smart Ecosystem capabilities at

AWS re:Invent at Las Vegas in December.

NEXT STEPS: DIGITAL BUSINESS MARKETPLACE PRODUCTISATION

Industrial IoT is a global phenomenon and

requires the capabilities to allow it to scale

securely and in a joined-up way. Many IoT

manufacturers and vendors are very

concerned about security and reputation

and are increasingly looking to implement

Intel® SDO so that they can onboard and

secure their own products and services

to ensure the secure establishment of

their devices.

Proving that the technology and

partnering techniques can seamlessly

deliver customer requirements, and meet

the partnering, GDPR and data

sovereignty requirements has been

relatively straight-forward. However, the

reality is that delivering smart scenarios

needs a lot more than just technology: it

also means new ways of working, tooling

and resolving the critical issues around

managing liabilities and contracts.

What becomes apparent is that

delivering a Digital Business Marketplace

requires collaboration between different

organisations in a way that is quite

different from traditional business

practices. Digital Business Marketplaces

need companies to operate in plug-and-

play technical and commercial

ecosystems, as well as to be able to

support long-running contract activities.

This isn’t just about new technology and

new systems but also about being able to

build interoperable contracting

frameworks between multiple companies.

Companies often manage uncertainty

through significant mark-ups when asked

to contract and take responsibility for

another company’s supply chain. This is a

conundrum for secure IoT supply chains

because, more often than not, there will be

four or more organisations in even the

simplest supply chain making the

commercial proposition unviable.

Some may argue it is still possible to

offer a consumer IoT device under one

simple contract, where a trusted brand

takes responsibility for the other members

of the supply chain and the promise that

the IoT device will be kept secure. But this

contract situation will not last long if the

supply chain is compromised.

By way of example, in the industrial IoT

world with thousands of companies in the

ecosystem, the complexity and

combinations of different supply chain

scenarios supporting different frictionless

propositions the accountability options

becomes endless. While multi-nationals,

major corporates and governments will

generally want to hold one organisation

accountable, it is likely that they will also

not be willing to pay for mark-ups upon

mark-ups. This will see scenarios where

major customers may want to contract

directly with the various members of the

supply chain, while third parties are

contracted to coordinate, validate and

certify that the end-to-end supply chain

Service Level Agreements are being met.

Developing such arrangements needs

a new cross-industry approach. As a

not-for-profit global industry association,

the TM Forum’s collaboration environment

can provide an appropriate neutral venue

to mature understanding in this

critical area.

IN CONCLUSIONThe 4th industrial revolution and Smart

scenarios, including Smart Cities, Smart

Homes, Smart Grid, Smart Factories, and

Smart Security and Surveillance are being

held back and will struggle to scale until

the supply chain evolves into an ecosystem

that can deliver repeatable and secure IoT

devices and solutions, which can be easily

purchased and managed online. The

fully-automated self-service experience

must allow organisations to combine

different components together seamlessly

to deliver end-to-end solutions.

The 4th industrial revolution is also

about helping traditional industries

transform themselves, making their

products and services become Smart by

making the most of LTE/5G, IoT devices

and other technologies, such as AI, Virtual

Reality (VR) and robotics.

There are complex barriers hindering

the 4th industrial revolution which the DBM

Catalyst has been able to solve. These

include:

• The removal of manual processes, and

achieving secured zero-touch

establishment and in-life management

of IoT devices.

• The ability to deliver and maintain the

security of IoT devices and systems.

• The provision of millisecond decision

making capabilities at the edge.

• Frictionless trading between different

traditional organisations within an

ecosystem.

• The definition and adoption of

industry-agnostic repeatable patterns.

• Appropriate systems and tooling

for product managers to enable

Industry 4.0

The DBM Catalyst has solved key

challenges in the IoT device supply chain

and is a critical step to enabling Smart

scenarios to be delivered securely, at scale.

The capabilities and patterns already

established, as part of the DBM Catalyst

work, will provide a way to resolve multiple

differing standards and reduce the current

significant costs associated with the need

for laborious skilled manual work.

Within the DBM Catalyst, Accenture,

AWS, BT, Digiglu, Intel®, BearingPoint//

Beyond and their partners have solved this

complex problem within a standards-

based approach. Intel® SDO is driving

standards for IoT device provisioning with

its contributions to the Fast IDentity Online

(FIDO) Alliance IoT Working Group. This is

a key element underpinning the secure

supply chain scenarios delivered by the

DBM Catalyst. BT’s patented inventions

orchestrate the Intel® SDO onboarding

services to deliver a full zero-touch

experience. BearingPoint//Beyond’s

Infonova Digital Business and Partnering

Platform provides the frictionless trading

necessary to secure the supply chain

providing the capability to onboard,

abstract, trade, deliver and monetise the

IoT products and services. Accenture’s

digital self-service portal, and abstraction

and automation of network services,

supports the creation and configuration of

solutions and enables product managers

to launch and monetize new services.

Following the approach mapped out

within the DBM Catalyst has the potential

to deliver trusted, zero-touch IoT and

frictionless partnering at scale that will

enable the 4th Industrial Revolution.

For more information on the

technologies discussed here see

www.intel.co.uk/securedeviceonboard

or email: iotonboarding@intel.com

SPONSORED CONTENT

The DBM enables partners to manage their own products and services and trade them frictionlessly, enabling secure vertical solutions for industry 4.0.

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