TM Forum Acquires IPsphere

TM Forum announced Tuesday it has acquired IPsphere Forum, a non-profit international consortium focused on developing a universal operational framework for the assembly and delivery of services on converged infrastructures.

The IPSphere Framework will be integrated into the TM Forum's Service Delivery Framework program, creating a pre-commercial testbed for pilot programs and the demonstration of multivendor interoperability, the organizations said in a press statement.

“[T]he work IPsphere is doing to produce specifications to enable pan-provider business solutions, compliments the existing work of the TM Forum in relation to Service Delivery Platforms and Service Oriented Architecture. The closer alignment of these work efforts will deliver great benefits to our broad membership,” said Martin Creaner, president and CTO of the TM Forum.

Using the principles of an SOA, the IPsphere Framework defines a business layer that automates offer, purchase and provisioning of service components among multiple stakeholders. The framework also offers support for a standardized registration and discovery process, payments for resource usage and quality assurance, and interworking with session-based service environments.

The TM Forum's Service Delivery Framework focuses on enabling control of service lifecycle management across all execution environments allowing flexibility in binding services with product catalogs.

“Together, we create a comprehensive approach to service delivery and management that fully aligns our technology and standards with the key business and management issues of service providers,” said IPsphere Chairman Todd Shimizu. “As part of TM Forum, we seek to accelerate time-to-market for these standards to give better results for all of us and better services for our customers.”

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