Standards Watch: TM Forum Readies for Nice

Martin Creaner is president of the TM Forum. His organization will be holding its largest annual event, Management World 2008, next month in Nice, France. Creaner spoke with Billing & OSS World about the theme of the event and some of the initiatives being discussed there and addressed throughout the year.

On TM Forum’s recent event in Dubai

I have never seen more industry, more construction, more investment or more raw cash anywhere else I have ever been. There are literally hundreds of 40-story skyscrapers going up at the same time. The level of investment is amazing. It was a small show for us, but amazing. We had about 150 people from all the major telcos in the Middle East and their scope of interest is almost identical to that of people in Europe or the U.S. There is not a big difference between the challenges here or there. They are investing in SDPs, they are looking at IPTV and mobile TV, and they are looking at switching to advertising-based revenue models.

On what to expect in Nice

The core of the strategic plan is around the same topics as last year, which is that the industry is changing faster than anyone imagined. The media, Internet, cable and telecom industries are coming together and crossing over. We are spending a lot of time at the forum examining what the value chain looks like. We’re looking at how companies position themselves in that value chain, how they position themselves to survive because nobody really knows how things are going to go down. The service provider’s position in the value chain will probably change three times before breakfast and it’s probably going to be different for every single user.

So the main thrusts of our strategic vision are around driving the stability and maturity of service delivery platforms, driving the TM Forum into industries like cable, media and entertainment and driving the concept of end-to-end service management. One of the key areas has to be around the Service Delivery Framework (SDF) initiative, which we kicked off a year ago.

On the Service Delivery Framework

This is a very hot topic which we are just beginning to address. We’re not solving the major service delivery platform challenges, but we’re getting the terminology straight and defining the component of the service delivery platforms while they are still relatively agreed upon across the industry. And we are getting a lot of industry bodies working together to help.

That’s really important from an industry point of view, but we have a long way to go. The main focus of the work is understanding what the real management challenges are for SDPs. Those aspects need to be addressed. We need to understand how things like the SID (shared information data) model and the eTOM (telecom operations map) need to be changed to accommodate the SDP.

There’s a reason all these operators are looking for SDPs: stability. They see it as the shortest route to being relevant in the new marketplace. They are all worried about being slightly irrelevant with the emergence of over-the-top services.

Google is becoming a de facto SDP for the industry and they don’t even call them SDPs. People are simply integrating into Google Maps, Google Search, Google this and Google that.

On the forum’s cable outreach

The cable industry is using a lot of TM Forum work and they’re doing it in a non-structured sense. A lot of them use the eTOM, for instance, but they don’t necessarily talk to each other about how they use it. That’s why we created the cable interest group, to let people come together and start sharing experience about how to use TM Forum artifacts.

All the major cable companies have joined and they are telling us that things like the eTOM would be much more applicable to them if we added things that addressed what actually happens in cable, things that the [telecom] creators of eTOM never envisaged, because they just don’t happen in the telco world.

On your device management initiative

We have a device-management team looking at what sorts of standards need to be in place for device management. Service providers haven’t viewed the device as part of the network. The network has always ended at the house or the base station; it’s been part of the consumer world. But if you bring the device into the network, what kind of management do you want on that device? What sort of standardization is needed? And what kind of information do you need to pull off of that device, either about its usage preferences or about service quality?

That is all wrapped up in connection with end-to-end service management, whether it’s in revenue apportionment across the value chain or whether its service quality perceived by end users.