INTERVIEW: ATIS' Miller and Nightfire's Swaminathan

Leveraging its senior industry leadership and its more than average service provider participation, the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions began a major initiative last year to ensure that the organization and its 16 committees were addressing the industry’s top priorities and to instill a better—and more real—sense of cooperation among the industries other 300 or so organizations focused on developing standards.  

Last month, ATIS began sharing the results of this initiative, including the results of work done by the organization’s TOPS Council. The Technical and Operations Council, led by Bill Smith, president of interconnection services at BellSouth, identified its top five critical priorities for setting standards and established board member-led focus groups to address each one. 

The top most critical priorities, not necessarily in that order, are: security, voice-over-IP, wide area Ethernet, mobile wireless services and data interchange.

This week, Susan Miller, president of ATIS and Venkates Swaminathan, executive vice president and chief strategist for NightFire Software and leader of the Data Interchange Focus Group, discussed the changes taking place in ATIS and around the industry with Telephony.

Why the focus groups?
SWAMINATHAN: [Chairman] Ross Ireland started this major initiative to make sure we are defining our mission in the most sense given the fact that the industry has changed so much. We are now working hard to make sure ATIS and all the committees are addressing the things that are the top priorities in the industry.  

We set up the focus groups to create a cross-industry conversation…and build a bridge between the strategic vision that the ATIS board embodies and the tactical day-to-day execution of the people who do the standards work.  

Is this part of a bigger change taking place within ATIS and within the industry?
MILLER: It is part of a much larger change. The board did a rough survey of the 300 different groups working in the standards space and found there was really no co-ordination across these different groups. And we’re talking about groups like the IETF, The Multiservice Switching Forum and others who are active but without any real coordination to drive toward a set of priorities or to ensure that in the end, when standards work is done, we can really walk away with an implementable solution. 

I think it is the first time the industry has decided these priorities are significant. They really signal a change by the industry [toward] a very market-driven, business-driven approach to standards. And that’s a very different approach than developing standards for standards’ sake.  

The ITU recently announced more inter-organization co-operation.
What role does ATIS play?
MILLER: ATIS’ standards committees are the primary contributor to the ITU. We met with Houlin Zhao (Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau of the ITU) to talk about the basis for industry collaboration. The idea of needing coordination across the industry--not just here in the U.S., or North America--really resonates with the people who are bringing significant resources to the table in terms of standards development. One of Mr. Zhao’s frustrations has been that there hasn’t been a strong service provider representation in driving standards out of the ITU. And there clearly hasn’t been a strong North American service provider presence in that effort. ATIS has a significant service provider concentration.  It’s on that basis that Mr. Zhao wanted to talk to us--to say. ‘We need some of what you have.’  

Just to add…to the extent that ATIS establishes relationships with other groups, the goal is to have relationships with teeth in them. I think there is sort of a collaborative, celebratory process that a lot of groups go through where they say, “Yeah, we’re going to work together.” But in the end, it doesn’t drive toward any particular standards or solutions getting developed in a timely way. Our goal will be to drive toward standards in a time frame that is needed when the standards are needed and by whom they’re needed.

How did you decide the five priorities and what affect does your Data Interchange Focus Group have on the Ordering and Billing Forum?
SWAMINATHAN: These are the priorities of the industry as the ATIS board and the TOPS council perceive them. The Data Interchange group is one of those priorities. It is important that across service providers there are standards for processes, data models and interoperability agreement around back office transactions such as ordering, provisioning, billing, settlement, pre-ordering, trouble administration and management, SLAs, etc.

The focus group is working to put together a plan that says what standards are needed for these new services, who needs to develop them and what is the time line for when they’re needed. The OBF is a critical part of this. It is the place with the expertise and resources to do this. Even before ATIS started down this path, the OBF set up a strategic advisory group to determine how best to address the needs of the industry. A number of great initiatives emerged, such as the OBF taking over most of the wireless number portability standards for inter-carrier communications from CTIA. OBF will be an important part of how the focus group will accomplish the vision that the ATIS board deems is high priority. Our goal is to have the first draft of a plan with timelines and deliverables laid by the board meeting in October.  

Why the lack of service provider participation in the ITU and other organizations?
MILLER: Across the ITU’s constituency base, there used to be a dynamic of service providers to talk about what their requirements were and the vendors would respond. In some cases--driven in part by happier economic times--the vendor community wanted to be able to promote and distinguish their products and as such, they took the lead in some of these areas and the service providers fell to a quieter place.

However, I think you are starting to see a shift of that dynamic back where they know that if they want to drive toward what they need, service providers will need to put their requirement on that table. That is just one of the things that ATIS has to offer. We have this senior and service provider vision from across the industry. And I think that’s been of great interest to other groups like the ITU.