Expediting the time to market with new service offerings gives Service Providers a distinct advantage over their competitors. When they are first to market, they have an opportunity to not only generate new revenues earlier in the cycle of a product, but to neutralize any comparable offerings that eventually come down the pike from competitors.

Because service and product lifecycles are shorter now than ever before, any delay in rolling out services can be highly detrimental to service providers’ overall profitability and market share.

Services utilizing different networks, processes and systems and the ability to re-utilize previously developed systems for new services is limited, which means the costs and risks of developing new services is increased with new system development.

Why TM Forum?

First, to eliminate information silos and introduce seamless integration and data sharing between systems; second, to develop an environment with inter-system standard interfaces so that systems can interwork easily, inexpensively and flexibly.

The development of (and adherence to) strong standards for interoperability enables IT procurers to pick best-of-breed components, and to have them work together with minimal ‘integration tax.’ A means to that end, for example, is the Business Process Framework (eTOM), which defines a process framework in which operators ‘decompose’ their own processes so they can understand them and map them into workflows.

The Applications Framework (TAM) relates the abstract processes revealed in the Process Framework and links them to the applications which can execute them.

TM Forum standards and frameworks are designed to enable providers to evolve their IT environments to enable real data sharing and process automation - replacing information islands with a seamless IT environment that supports the rapid delivery and management of complex, next generation services. TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) standard is critical for this development.

The TM Forum ensures its standards actually get implemented through its Prosspero initiative, which packages working open-source code, testing frameworks, guidebooks, online developer support, development tools and access to reference implementations.