Empowering Service Providers With Service Lifecycle Management

The Service Delivery Framework Completes Phase Two, launches Phase Three

The budding Service Delivery Framework program has managed to stimulate more interest and eagerness than is common at such an early phase of standards development. Already, an impressive arsenal of work around the Framework has been demonstrated, such as that by cross-industry juggernauts like IBM, Oracle, CA and Microsoft, which presented their use of the Service Delivery Framework at the recent Service Delivery Platform Summit. The audience’s response validated that Service Providers want to maintain control of service lifecycle management, across all execution environments (i.e., SDP, IPTV, IMS).

“As they look to monetize services, Service Providers clearly do not want someone dictating how they should architect their SDP; rather, they want guidelines that help them bind services with product catalogs, as well as specifics about business- and operations processes,” says Lucia Gradinariu, CA advisor, industry programs.
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An NGOSS “Contract Factory” For Agility and Shorter Time to Market
The Architectural Harmonization team has completed its blueprint for building NGOSS Contracts (GB942). The document is out for final review, and will help draw together conceptual TM Forum frameworks bound by NGOSS. Ostensibly, the GB942 will provide an NGOSS template that will make use of the Service Delivery Framework for service lifecycle management, and Interface Program implementations for output that will be “Prosspero-ready.”

“GB942 is somewhat of an API on steroids; it binds key components by defining the SOA relationship among TAM components, and the eTOM processes flowing between TAM components, as well as the SID data objects reference by a Contract,” explains BT’s Steve Orobec, who has generated a lot of interest around his project to incorporate Cisco’s donated Eclipse tool (TigerStripe). Orobec and the Architecture Harmonization team are working toward a common style of input/output by defining an electronic NGOSS Contract data exchange template between the NGOSS Contracts and TigerStripe tools. “The TigerStripe tool will focus on its existing code generation capability, and the NGOSS tool will focus on its abstraction capability for integrating existing TMF programs, including web 2.0 relationships,” adds Orobec.
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ITIL and eTOM—Building Bridges
It was only a matter of time before current market demands around convergence drove together two powerful frameworks—the TM Forum Business Process Framework (eTOM), and the itSMF’s ITIL for defining good practice in Service Management.

“The eTOM brings a strong business perspective around understanding how business needs are translated into processes and into implementation; ITIL brings the perspective of a supported service management environment,” says TM Forum’s Mike Kelly, senior program manager, Collaboration Program. “For example, using eTOM we can build process flows that tie into the enterprise, which then show how ITIL good practice can be applied in real-world situations.”
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The Interface Program Releases MTOSI 2.0
The TM Forum Interface Program, which focuses on specifying common interfaces among networks and their support systems, unleashed new functionality for both the revenue management and service management domains with MTOSI 2.0. Through a unified set of interfaces representing key areas in revenue- and service management, MTOSI 2.0 addresses resource inventory, provisioning, trouble ticket management and performance management, as well as service activation, service component activation and service inventory.

With these interfaces, MTOSI 2.0 also takes into account emerging “transversal aspects” of services, such as management of connectionless networks; inventory updates; multi-event inventory notifications; and enhanced inventory retrieval (attribute value matching).

These interface solutions cover a wide range of service management (order handling, service activation, trouble ticketing), resource management (inventory, assurance, diagnostics) and system management (user authentication and single sign on) functional interfaces. 

TM Forum Interface Program Continues To Build
The TM Forum Interface Program continues to grow. It now includes the interfaces that glue together MTOSI (network and service management from transport); MTNM (the interfaces that model the management of multi-technology networks); OSS/J (the multi-technology APIs that deliver on NGOSS design guidelines for component-based OSS systems); IPDR (the interfaces used for usage data management and accounting); and CO-OP (an initiative to promote unified standards for element management and user management).

A single roadmap is possible now that these critical elements come together in a common architectural framework. This empowers service providers with the “freedom to choose” the OSSs they want based on prices, quality and functionality. That mitigates, or even eliminates, the “integration tax” that has proved so costly through expensive OSS integration projects.