New Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management (ZOOM) project launched to rewrite the rulebook for management of virtualized networks and services; six NFV-related Catalysts slated for TM Forum Live! in Nice, France, take practical solutions and implementation approach 

MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, BARCELONA, SPAIN – Feb. 24, 2014: As demand for elastic and software-defined network (SDN) capabilities rise, service providers are facing a digital transformation of the way they build and operate their networks and manage services. The transformation opens up a new wave of innovations and business growth opportunities, but requires reimagined operations practices to realize the promise of this new approach, including flexible, personalized services and drastically decreased time-to-market. To provide a blueprint for these new practices, today, TM Forum is launching its new Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management (ZOOM) project.

The Vision of ZOOM

Led by TM Forum and supported by the world’s leading providers and suppliers, including AT&T, IBM, Huawei, Oracle, Orange and Telecom Italia, ZOOM’s goal is to define a vision of the new virtualized operations environment, and a management architecture based on the seamless interaction between physical and virtual components that can easily and dynamically assemble personalized services.

In addition, ZOOM aims to identify and define new security approaches to protect infrastructure, functions and services across all layers of software and hardware; and complement ongoing work within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and other organizations so that the Forum and its members are working together with other industry leaders to provide the management platform and transformation guidance to support successful deployment of network functions virtualization (NFV).

TM Forum and its members are already working on ZOOM’s tangible outputs as part of the Forum’s renowned Collaboration program. This work includes specialized NFV workshops, Action Week working sessions, and six ground-breaking Catalyst proof-of-concept projects, or rapid collaborative projects, driven by Forum member companies that will demonstrate their first results in just four months at TM Forum Live!, June 2-5, in Nice, France.

“The pressure for IT and operational agility to enable new digital service revenues, and continuing demand for cost reduction makes it essential to radically rethink network, operations and service management. Virtualized environments can open up previously unimaginable expectations for service personalization, speed, flexibility, automation and customer centricity,” said Nik Willetts, chief strategy officer, TM Forum. “ZOOM brings together the industry and the Forum’s extensive set of best practices and standards to deliver practical answers for game-changing operations concepts, including operations, adaptive automation and customer-created service definitions.”

NFV Workshops and Action Week

To date, TM Forum has held three NFV management workshops for its members beginning with Action Week in Baltimore in June, 2013. Second and third workshops followed at Digital Disruption 2013 in San Jose, Calif., and in December at TM Forum’s headquarters in Morristown, NJ. The Forum incorporated the output of those workshops to accelerate the work at Action Week in Madrid (Feb. 10-14) which featured five days of sessions focused on virtualized technologies like NFV and SDN, and the impact they will have on the operations management.

At TM Forum Action Week in Madrid, members including Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Ciena, HP, Huawei, Microsoft, Oracle, Orange, Sprint and others, validated the ZOOM concepts as part of the project launch. The meetings focused on detailed technical discussions on a number of management and operations challenges for NFV, including the operational management of virtualized infrastructure, TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) model and NFV requirements, enterprise-to-enterprise service level agreement management, policy management, security and more.

TM Forum Live!

Since the first NFV workshop in Baltimore, the Forum’s members have been working together to form six NFV-related Catalyst projects slated for TM Forum Live! as a way to validate proposed solutions and verify the practical aspects of NFV implementations. The following Catalysts address a wide range of topics including management over multi-provider networks, service bundling using open APIs, and building an NFV management framework using TM Forum’s Frameworx best practices and standards.

• Management of Ecosystems of Virtual Machines using SDN and NFV in Enterprises and WANs
• CloudNFV: Building an NFV framework using Frameworx
• NFV Meta: Providing a live NFV ecosystem to support a complex network
• Converged Network Optimization in a Virtualized Multi-Provider Environment
• Self-Optimizing Networks: Centralized Policy Control
• Service Bundling in a B2B2X Marketplace

In addition, TM Forum will delve into NFV and SDN during a two-day track at TM Forum Live! Speakers from Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, HP, Huawei, Orchestral Networks, SaskTel, Telefonica, Telstra, Time Warner Cable, ZTE and more will cover the core topics of TM Forum’s Frameworx and network virtualization; adding SDN and NFV to existing operations and billing support systems; monetizing virtualized networks; and exploring the boundaries of virtualization.

The TM Forum Live! conference and expo series brings together all the elements of TM Forum’s focus on leading the successful transformation of service providers and enterprises to help them succeed in the digital world. TM Forum Live! is the Forum’s flagship event and features its industry-leading Excellence Awards.

About TM Forum

TM Forum is a global trade association trusted by the world’s largest enterprises, service providers and suppliers to help them continuously transform to succeed in the digital economy. We help our members reduce costs and risks, improve business agility and grow their business through a wealth of knowledge, tools, standards, training and practical advice.

We bring together more than 85,000 professionals from 900+ member companies to share experiences, collaborate and rapidly solve critical business challenges including IT transformation, business process optimization, big data analytics, cloud management, customer experience management and cyber security. Our three strategic programs—Agile Business and IT, Customer Engagement and Open Digital —enable us to provide a platform for overcoming the barriers to an open digital world. For more information about TM Forum, visit www.tmforum.org

Global TM Forum Media Contact
Elizabeth Coyne
Senior Director Marketing, Corporate Communications and PR
+1 973 641 3247
[email protected]