September 22, 2008 – IPsphere has joined TM Forum and will integrate its framework for business process sharing across IP information, communications and entertainment service supply chain partners into the TM Forum’s expanding Service Delivery Framework program.

The IPsphere Framework (IPSF) defines a business layer that automates offer, purchase and provisioning of service components among multiple stakeholders. That business layer is being defined for three primary scenarios:

• Intra-provider services across a single service provider’s various departments;
• Inter-provider services, such as VPNs, that cross multiple provider boundaries;
• Vertical partnering, where a service such as Web video requires automation of resource allocation, billing, revenue assurance and other business processes among stakeholders that might include content owners, Web portals, CDN operators and local access network operators.

The Framework also offers support for standardized registration and discovery processes, payments for resource usage and quality assurance, and interworking with session-based service environments.

Participants, including service providers Deutsche Telekom, Telus, Telenor and Telstra and technology suppliers Juniper Networks, NetOne Systems Japan and Red Zinc in Ireland, are set to undertake IPSF field trials in October. Following validation exercises in London in late 2007, the field trials will incorporate worldwide implementation of IPSF across facilities in Asia, Europe and North America.

Complementary to IPsphere’s work is the TM Forum’s newer Service Delivery Framework (SDF), which focuses on enabling control of service lifecycle management across all execution environments while allowing flexibility in binding services with product catalogues.

The SDF project’s first phase spelled out functional areas required to operationalize multiple SDPs within a network operator’s domain. In July its second phase produced a reference architecture aligned with service oriented architecture (SOA) – which breaks enterprise level software and processes into reusable and recombinable components – in anticipation of applying its framework to multi-stakeholder service scenarios (see Screen- Plays, September 2008, page 16).

Using SOA to integrate the principles and technical work of the IPsphere and Service Delivery Frameworks will create a pre-commercial testbed for pilot program testing and the demonstration of multi-vendor interoperability.

The end game: enabling service providers, content owners, Web services developers and other supply chain partners to rapidly and collaboratively create and deploy IPbased, multistakeholder services, and then to automate ongoing business and operations processes among them.

“Innovation is happening outside the traditional boundaries of telecoms – independent software developers and the like – and we’re going to have to have more collaboration,” says Lee Himbeault, senior strategy manager for Canadian operator TELUS and leader of the IPsphere Business Committee. “We see IPSF as both business and technical means for creating those services and for delivery and assurance of those services. We also like the SOA approach as a foundational piece for that increased innovation, and for more cost effective creation and delivery of new services.”

In the absence of IPsphere, Himbeault says, the IP services market might “continue to be fragmented and even fractured. Through early work, we’re setting up for a new level of collaboration. We’ll see a lot of reuse [of network, operations and service components] and cost efficiencies and a number of new metrics. Macro level metrics might be rapid time to market, better ability to collaborate and how many services do we actually have that involve two or three outside partners?”

Although membership in both bodies already largely overlaps, all IPsphere members now will become TM Forum members. Both bodies are largely populated by network operators and technology suppliers. Over the past year and a half, both TM Forum and IPsphere also have sought participation of content community businesses in building service delivery and management guidelines. However, according to Martin Creaner, president and CTO of TM Forum, discussions with major studios including Paramount, Walt Disney Co. and a range of other companies led to the conclusion that, “the whole delivery mechanism is a little bit alien to content owners.”

“It’s other people in the chain who have a huge interest, people like the content aggregators – the ones who do the aggregation and delivery, like the Brightcoves and Akamais,” he says. “We’re increasingly finding that content owners, yes, are interested, but they view two or three other players between them and the delivery. Those are companies we’ve been bringing into the process.”

IPsphere will make its first public debut as the TM Forum IPsphere Program at TM Forum Management World, November 17-20 in Orlando. The consortium retains key leadership, including IPsphere chairman Todd Shimizu as Steering Committee chairman; Telus’s Hembeault as Business Committee chair; Nick Sampson of France Telecom as Service Provider Council chair; and Tanja de Groot of Alcatel Lucent as Technical Committee chair.

According to Shimizu, earlier IPsphere work spelled out session services, resource management and other functional blocks that define the Framework, and it defined how operators may view and exchange IPsphere messages to compose a service across multiple service delivery entities.

Now IPSF work is focused on implementation, through demonstration showcases, experiments and field trials like the one set for October; and on use cases, where service providers are contributing their business imperatives and requirements for how the Framework can help them deliver VPN, content delivery network (CDN), telepresence and other IP services.

“This is where we believe we’ve earned our ‘Business of IP’ tagline,” Shimizu says. “Service providers are very invested in the program, and we’re inviting participants in the field trial to go off and do experiments of their own, in addition to our own test program. We now have the opportunity to extend an invitation to 700 other TM Forum members to participate.”

In 2008, TM Forum increasingly came to the position that the work of IPsphere and TM Forum on service delivery and management “had such strong alignment that it would be sensible to join forces and bring IPsphere’s work inside the TM Forum,” Creaner says. The integration of that work “stops the potential for two important organizations going in different directions.”