Catalyst for progress

If you're familiar with TM Forum events, you're familiar with the Catalyst Projects. The TMF calls them, collectively, its living lab. For nine years, twice a year, member companies work together in a collaborative environment with emerging technologies and capabilities to solve some of the most pressing operational and interoperability issues.

Some projects are one-time proofs of concept while others are multi-phased approaches to long-standing issues. This nineteenth iteration of the Catalysts in Dallas next month features four projects, all of which are Phase 1 initiatives and all of which focus on the converged services world, said Debbie Burkett, director of market collaboration at the TM Forum.

The projects are: the End-to-End Integrated BSS Framework, the Mobile Backhaul Management Catalyst, Seamless OSS/BSS for IMS Services and the Converged Services Showcase. Each project demonstrates how TMF standards and frameworks can be used to solve real-world problems, but they also contribute potentially to future work within the TMF.

The Mobile Backhaul project, for instance, is applying recommendations from the harmonization efforts to align OSS/J, MTOSI and the SID, Burkett said. Both the Converged Services Showcase and Seamless OSS/BSS projects highlight areas being studied by the Service Delivery Framework (SDF) team.

"The Catalyst results will help the SDF and Telecom Media Convergence (TMC) teams with validation of business requirements and recommendations for solutions. They are very much contributing to the new work in the forum," Burkett said.

The following are brief overviews of each project.

The Converged Services Showcase, also known and promoted at the Management World Americas event as Content Encounter, is the TM Forum's Interactive Digital Media and Communications Village. It is being championed by AT&T and conducted by Alcatel-Lucent, BEA, Cognizant, IBM, Leapstone and Microsoft. It features an interactive walking tour to experience personalized content delivered across an integrated set of devices. The objective is to demonstrate how industry standards and best practices enable multiple parties in the service supply chain to quickly create, deliver and manage the lifecycle of complex, bundled services and a wide range of converged services with rich media content.

"[This] is a fresh and new way to demonstrate management solutions by focusing more on the end user than the back-office functions. The demo is designed to be interactive from start to finish," Burkett said. "I believe this is an important aspect that the TM Forum has not focused on before. The management focus of the project is currently on content acquisition, administration and consumption. I fully expect the interface between the content provider and service provider to emerge as a standard over the coming year."

Mobile Backhaul Management is creating a blueprint for managing mobile backhaul services for cable operators. This Catalyst, championed by Time Warner Cable, will demonstrate how cable providers can implement an open, flexible OSS solution to manage the backhaul infrastructure. It utilizes TM Forum standards such as MTOSI, SID, eTOM and OSS/J. Participating companies include Alcatel-Lucent, BEA, Cisco, Cognizant Technology Solutions, IBM, Nakina Systems, Progress Software, Sun Microsystems and Telcordia.

Seamless OSS/BSS for IMS Services explores a management framework for centralized IMS services that will enable operators to offer an array of ubiquitous service offerings. It will demonstrate deployment, activation and management scenarios for a full-duplex, real-time audio-visual communication offering across a range of devices including SIP phones and laptops. The project is championed and led by China Unicom, with co-champion Chunghwa Telecom. Participating companies are Amdocs, Microsoft, Tata Consultancy Services, TechMahindra and ZTE.

"The objective is to apply and validate the TM Forum NGOSS framework and relevant, evolving interface standards from 3GPP, 3GPP2 and ETSI to understand gaps, strengths, weaknesses and the impact on the OSS/BSS environment," Burkett said.

The same team worked together on a project last year in Dallas and is reusing some of the work accomplished then. "However, Chunghwa Telecom and Microsoft products are the only reused products [from that project]. Seamless OSS/BSS focuses on the latest version of MTOSI and the IMS standards coming from 3GPP and 3GPP2. I think of this as a fresh project, not Phase 2," Burkett said.

End-to-End Integrated BSS Framework demonstrates a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based integration framework using TM Forum standards for the rapidly converging telecom and media markets. This is a major area of focus for the TM Forum, and last year the forum started the Telecom Media Convergence group to address it. This Catalyst integrates various applications such as Product Lifecycle Management, Customer Relationship Management, Order Management, Provisioning and Billing for both the converged service provider and other content providers. It will use an SOA framework to demonstrate a customer lifecycle across concept-to-market and lead-to-cash processes. Participating companies are Aricent, Ceon, Infosys and SubexAzure.

"This End-to-End proof of concept is a late addition to the Dallas line up. The project is out of the norm in that it does not have a project champion," Burkett said.