Feb 20, 2006 12:00 AM,

MIDDLE EAST CARRIER MAKES TMF 500

By Tim McElligott

The TeleManagement Forum celebrated its 500th member this month, a steady growth of more than 150 companies over the last two years despite significant industry consolidation. The TMF also launched its first New Generation Operations Systems and Software user group and a Telecoms Media Convergence Team that will examine the forum's role in the evolving telecom value chain.

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MTC Group, a Middle East service provider, became the benchmark carrier to the TMF, and with the influx of other new members is edging the forum in new directions. The user group was created to better support companies that use the NGOSS framework and other TMF models such as eTOM (Telecom Operations Map.)

“The TMF is excellent at making standards and reasonably good at promoting their importance to the world, but it hasn't always been great at supporting the people who are trying to use them,” said Martin Creaner, the TMF's chief technology officer. “One of our goals is to grow our ability to support the users of the TMF work.”

The forum also recently created a change control board to help users provide feedback for potential changes to the NGOSS framework. “Companies may be doing a major piece of work but have no way of telling people about it so it can get back into the original TMF work,” Creaner said.

Building on its user group initiative, the TMF has created Web communities to enhance the level of discussion among members and the other 40,000 registered users on its Web site.

Perhaps the biggest change is the focus of the Telecoms Media Convergence Team. It addresses the changes in the value chain brought about by an emphasis on content delivery. The TMF is actively recruiting new players in that chain, such as Microsoft, Google, eBay and others.

“We have a huge amount to offer the content people, the aggregators, the portal people … we can apply what we have learned in traditional telecoms over the last ten years, which is still completely applicable but needs to be communicated to them,” Creaner said.