Management World: BT preps “service factory” test

The work underlying BT’s project comes largely from the TM Forum’s Product and Service Assembly (PSA) TM Forum Catalyst Project, which demonstrated a model by which telecom services could be created, assembled and launched. The PSA project resulted in two outputs: a standardized architecture for rapid service creation and a series of APIs, conforming to existing TM Forum NGOSS principles, to guide the integration of PLM into other back-office processes. The TM Forum has moved the work done in the PSA Catalyst into its TIPs, or TMF Interface Program group, which is further trying to bring PLM processes into the mainstream of telco BSS/OSS systems and processes.

The PSA work, and BT’s implementation of it, showcases “an agile service delivery architecture, from the bottom of the network to the IMS layer and the order management processes on top,” said Simon Osbourne, vice president of the Acxiom product business unit inside vendor Comptel, who helped lead the PSA project. Comptel has built catalog and service lifecycle management products of its own based on the work from the TM Forum PSA Catalyst project. “It’s all about dynamically assembling a service based on certain policies, and the dependencies and relationships between various systems to make it happen. If you look at the Dell model, there’s an a la carte feel [to building a computer on Dell.com], but actually it’s very well-policed.”

BT’s service factory concept fits into the larger idea of telco product lifecycle management, or PLM. For years, sophisticated (PLM) platforms and processes have helped physical product manufacturers speed and automate new product development and delivery. Now communications service providers, facing the same competitive pressures and speed-to-market issues, are increasingly turning to PLM concepts – and searching for PLM-style tools – to turn their network environments into design-and-ship “factories” capable of rapidly churning out new products and services.