CA and Sony put media face on TMW

The TeleManagement Forum couldn’t have asked for better representatives to argue for the benefits of the telecom and media industries working together on network management issues than CA and Sony who presented their case study this week to attendees at TeleManagement World in Nice, France.

TMF has been making a concerted effort to build relationships with content, media and entertainment companies since before last year when it launched its Telecom Media Convergence team. The forum also recently appointed Jonathan Anderson, vice president of operations at Time Warner to its board.

But this week, CA and Sony jointly presented their success story for securing content creation, distribution and management in a digital world—a fancy description for how IT and telecom solutions and practices from CA helped a media player like Sony transform its operations to reduce cost and risk and improve revenues.

Sony has content distribution in 67 countries and data centers operating on three continents. It needed among other things a centralized identity management system, common authentication and authorization policies and better integration across applications and systems and to streamline its user management procedures.

Sony also was looking for a way to better manage access to enterprise systems as well as self-service and role-based administration. And telecom people were interested in things they will be dealing with soon.

“People want to hear how Sony, as a representative of the broader media industry, is dealing with things like how they get their early releases of movies out to editors and all the other people in the ecosystem while still controlling it so it doesn’t get pirated in the process,” said Norman Price, vice president and general manager of CA. “It’s a constant challenge, but they have been able to address that.”

Rice said the forum and its members see that the lines between telecom and media are blurring and want really want the media and entertainment companies involved.

“The blurring of the lines is true. It is happening,” Rice said. “The forum wants additional participation by these guys, and I think they have it with people like Sony, Time Warner and other folks.”

Given the announcement by the TMF this week about bringing in the IPDR.org and the Global Billing Association into its organization, the blurring of lines between OSS and BSS are also real.

“Convergence is something we all talk about, but I believe that TMW in Dallas last December was a tipping point for me,” Rice said. “We did informal polls in our meetings there, and a little more than 50% of the people were from the IT side of the house. They were the IT architects working for the CIO. To me those are the advanced troops being sent in by the IT organization to gain a better understanding of a different operational issues so they can create integrated architectures for the future.”