System integrators return to TeleManagement Forum

Like swallows back to Capistrano, system integrators are appearing in small numbers back in the booths of the TMF’s TeleManagement World conference. But the relatively new migrants, companies such as Satyam and Cymbal, look different from their predecessors.

These companies are not the big system integrators typically associated with telecom, such as Accenture, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young or even IBM. They are smaller, IT-focused integrators taking advantage of the convergence of IT and OSS facilitated by the growth of IP-based network technology in telecom. And they rely heavily on talent from India.

Satyam joined the TeleManagement Forum three years ago when Alpna Doshi, vice president of computer services joined the company. This year, in addition to being a sponsor of the TMW event, and putting Doshi--who has held executive positions at Verizon, Telcordia and Deloitte & Touche--up for election to the forum’s board of directors, Satyam initiated a project with the TMF to develop an NGOSS Compliance Catalog.

NGOSS (New Generation Operations Systems and Software) is the forum’s framework for integrating standardized OSS components. The catalog would be a repository of all products and solutions that have been tested for NGOSS compliance.

"The first phase of the catalog is ready," Doshi said. "We are working on an auto-compliance engine to test compliance with any of the related principles such as eTOM and the [shared information data model.]"

Doshi said that despite the TMF’s ultimate goal of setting standards such as NGOSS that would someday make OSS nearly plug-and-play and reduce the need for system integrators, the effort wouldn’t take business away from them.

"NGOSS is more of a re-alignment of things. There will always be a need to make systems work better together," Doshi said.

Cymbal’s Helena Pechaver Starc, vice president of marketing, agrees. "There is always so much more than can be done to leverage existing investments," she said.

Cymbal was founded in 1998 to do high-end system integration, application life-cycle management, custom application development and other consultative practices. Much of its work has been with business support systems. The company has done work with Hutchinson 3G, Virgin Mobile and mobile virtual network enabler, Visage. Last week, Cymbal vice president of telecom services, Arthur Musgrove, participated in another new phenomenon at TeleManagement Forum: a billing summit. Musgrove said billing is becoming much more strategic. It appears that the TMF believes so as well, IN addition to created a summit dedicated to billing, the organization registered four new billing members in the last six months. Since Musgrove believes that not all standards are good and that not all things need to be standardized, as he said in the summit, there should plenty of work for a little system integrator with billing and BSS experience.