TMF subsumes two billing groups

With an eye toward filling its back office portfolio to include business as well as operations support systems, and in need of tools to attract cable and media companies to its organization, the TeleManagement Forum this week announced that the IPDR.org and the Global Billing Association will become part of the TMF.

The announcement was made at the forum's TeleManagement World event in Nice, France. Both billing organizations have been active at TMW events for a number of years, with GBA running the billing and revenue assurance session tracks, and IPDR.org participating in, and sometimes sponsoring, some of the forum's Catalyst projects. IPDR.org also submitted its original specifications for IP detail records to the forum's Prosspero program. That, too, will be announced this week in Nice. Prosspero was launched one year ago at TMW as a program to accelerate the implementation and broad adoption of the TM Forum business and technical road map.

A year ago, the TMF subsumed the OSS for Java Initiative (OSS/J), which it has successfully integrated, said Martin Creaner, TMF president.

“This should end any discussion as to whether the TMF is the single global association for anything related to OSS/BSS,” Creaner said.

Since being named president of the organization in January, Creaner has been putting his stamp on the TMF. “I have a five-year plan for us to become relevant across a whole range of areas — BSS, cable, content, devices and more — and that can't all be done organically,” he said.

Bringing the two leading billing associations into its fold will help the forum bolster recent initiatives to address the cable and content arenas. In January, CableLabs, the cable industry's research and development consortium, adopted IPDR.org's IPDR Streaming Protocol into its OpenCable Application Platform Version 1.1 initiative in order to encode and transmit metrics to a collections system within the cable operator. The TMF followed by appointing Jonathan Anderson, vice president of operations for Time Warner Cable, as the first representative of the cable industry on its board. And two weeks ago, UPC Broadband, Europe's largest cable operator, joined the forum.

As for its relationship with content and media companies, the forum launched its Telecom Media Convergence group last year. A progress report is due from the group this week. Creaner feels that the rating and charging expertise of the GBA will help it address these companies better.

“It would be hard for me to stand up in front of Universal Studios and convince them I had something to help them with their problems in life, but if we have a close relationship with an organization that already has that relationship, it opens the door for us to talk,” Creaner said.

Organizationally, the integration of the two billing organizations will be handled much the same as OSS/J. They will be brought in as “ring-fenced” programs, which means that, for at least the first six months, they will run with what Creaner called “a huge amount of autonomy.” After an acquaintance period, the organizations will begin to integrate where it makes sense.

“OSS/J had a significant cultural impact on the TMF,” Creaner said. “It stimulated us to create the Prosspero program, which came out of an OSS/J mentality, not a TMF mentality. So we expect this new change will have either a subtle or significant impact on how the TMF works.”

Economically, Creaner said it also makes sense. “There is a huge number of associations out there, and you need them because there are lots of problems to solve,” he said. “But when several organizations are addressing roughly the same space, consolidating them can only be a benefit to our members.”