TeleManagement Forum partners with ITU-T on standards

You can tell the world has changed when the International Telecommunications Union enlists the help of other industry fora in developing standards. But that’s exactly what happened this week when the ITU Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and the TeleManagement Forum announced a partnership agreement.

Under the agreement, the ITU-T can adopt TMF standards as their own and will have the right to recommend changes that the TMF would implement on its own.

“The ITU and industry has changed a lot,” said Keith Willetts, chairman of the TeleManagement Forum. “We have been fortunate to negotiate an agreement where we can submit our work into the ITU, which they will publish but not change.”

Now in its 15th year, The TMF has been developing models and frameworks for building interoperable software solutions for telecom operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) through the active participation of its members—the vendors, developers and service providers in this space.

“Telecom is the latest in a long line of industries to go through a transformation that says, ‘if you don’t get continually leaner and smarter about what you do, you are probably heading out of business,” Willetts said. ‘The [role] of the TMF is to help enable that transformation to a much leaner world. But we simply can’t do that without a lot of collaboration with other entities.”

In June, the TMF and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) agreed to converge their shared information and modeling approaches to help support telecommunications and enterprise management convergence, using the best practices from both environments. The two groups had developed shared or federated information models separately but agreed to integrate the DMTF’s Common Information Model and the TMF’s Shared information model.

“Both models had similarities and it was important that we not confuse the industry by having two different models,” Willetts said. “This is another example of how we are trying to enable the industry to get lean and mean. We are not here to confuse things with another raft of papers that adds to the confusion and the operating budgets.”

The first potential standard to be submitted to the ITU will be the latest release (Version 3.5) of TMF’s eTOM documentation. The new version was approved by TMF within the last month and will be released in the coming weeks.