For many companies participating in a convergent, multi-service world, it is very costly to introduce new vendors into management environments.

Because IT environments are typically quite fragmented—with many smaller suppliers comprising solutions—there are high costs associated with adding new systems or making changes to existing systems in business process automation efforts.

Without the ability to easily introduce new vendors, IT managers are locked into existing vendor solutions, which means they often spend more money on customization than on bids for new systems.

Because the majority of inter-vendor interfaces are not standardized, customized knowledge is needed to make any changes. Without a doubt, that becomes a very expensive way to integrate and maintain systems.

Why TM Forum?

Companies need flexibility in how they make changes in their management systems. No software product or solution can stand alone in today’s complex management environments, as all components must be capable of integration. Only with simplified integration can service providers and their partners work to reduce TCO.

A TM Forum standards-based approach is the most efficient way to drive down TCO throughout the development and integration lifecycle. Because TM Forum members learn how to re-use artifacts across multiple projects, they experience an ongoing reduction in the need to maintain multitudes of custom interfaces. They also realize reduced need for building new interfaces whenever changes in the network or in management environments are necessary. For these reasons, TM Forum members ultimately realize a reduction in full lifecycle development costs.

The thrust of the TM Forum's technical and business frameworks, as well as standards initiatives, is to define a structured way of planning, procuring and managing IT:

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.