Nearly 300 member companies from around the globe worked on more than a dozen agile projects to collectively provide actionable tools and information for digital businesses

TM FORUM LIVE!, Nice, France — June 2, 2015: As TM Forum Live! kicks into full gear, TM Forum today announces the latest version of its blueprint for digital business success, TM Forum Frameworx™ 15. This release contains new toolkits, best practices, guides and reports, which empower companies across multiple industries with actionable information to thrive in the digital economy. The Forum’s diverse global membership, which includes more than 90% of the world’s largest service providers, can now make use of these important tools.

“Frameworx 15 is a landmark release and an important step forward in our mission to enable the next generation of enterprise-class digital services. In a world of ‘co-opetition,’ the Forum is successfully fostering collaborative innovation and solving the common challenges that impede industry progress,” said Nik Willetts, chief digital officer, TM Forum. “From the new Procurement Survival Kit for NFV to the ROI Calculator for Customer Experience Management and the unveiling of the Digital Services Toolkit, as well as dozens of additional features, this release clearly demonstrates the maturity of our portfolio of practical and usable assets produced collaboratively by our members, for our members, across a broad spectrum of topics and industry sectors.”

Highlights of Frameworx 15

Since February 2015, hundreds of individuals from nearly 300 member companies have used TM Forum’s agile collaboration and development platform across 13 distinct projects to deliver the new features in Frameworx 15, working within the context of the Forum’s three strategic programs: Agile Business and IT, Open Digital Ecosystem and Customer Centricity.

Agile Business & IT

TM Forum’s Agile Business and IT Program helps service providers and enterprises to get fit for the digital world and continuously optimize their IT and business operations. Key features in Frameworx 15 that support this program come from the ZOOM (Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management) project. This project has identified and verified the key transformation drivers and challenges – validated by studies and Collaboration Community reviews – and is taking the right steps to providing the guidance needed for digital operations transformation.

Key features in Frameworx 15 include:

• A novel end-to-end SLA management approach for hybrid operations, underpinned by the world’s first information model for the hybrid scenario and separation of concerns by providing dynamic delegation of SLA targets driven by policy.
• A catalog approach for creating services by composing service components from internal (make) and external (buy/rent) activities, underpinned by a federated catalog model, a comprehensive UML catalog model in the Information Framework, as well as DevOps and agile product lifecycle management. This enables service providers to assemble a wide range of services across the entire digital ecosystem with maximum commercial flexibility.
• A Procurement Survival Kit for procurement professionals, underpinned by procurement patterns, ecosystem partner management, NFV procurement packaging, federated catalogs and maturity models.

Ten Catalyst Projects at TM Forum Live! showcase the Forum’s ZOOM work, and the importance of SDN/NFV within the industry, as they cover a number of topics impacting NFV including orchestration, security and operations transformation.

Open Digital Ecosystem

TM Forum’s Open Digital Ecosystem Program helps service providers, enterprises and technology suppliers create and manage complex, innovative services by establishing the right tools, APIs, standards and best practices. Key features from this program in Frameworx 15 are indented to empower organizations with the actionable information they need to accelerate R&D and time-to-market while reducing risk:

• Global, cross industry collaboration efforts have resulted in an end-to-end set of assets to support any organization in any digital business. These capabilities include key components such as partnership best practices (B2B2x), service platform architecture (DSRA), and APIs that are purpose built for the digital economy. Based on contributions from Orange, Huawei, Ericsson, Microsoft, BT, NBN Co and others, these assets have been validated with in-depth use cases for Smart Energy, Digital Health, Smart City, IoT and other scenarios.
• The Digital Services Toolkit provides a structured methodology and process to map business context to any Frameworx asset. The toolkit enables users to identify components comprised of Frameworx, APIs, CEM, Metrics, Data Analytics, SDN & NFV and third-party assets to provide an actionable “recipe” to create, design and deploy digital services. These capabilities reduce risk, improve time-to-market and increase agility of any organization seeking to capitalize on the dynamic IoT and Open Digital Economy opportunities.

Six Catalyst Projects at TM Forum Live! are showcasing the Forum’s Open Digital collaborative work, including Smart Energy, Digital Health and Smart Cities along with several examples of how Open Digital enabling technologies have been deployed.

Customer Centricity

TM Forum’s Customer Centricity Program recognizes the substantial impacts on customer experience, data analytics and metrics caused by the increasing prominence of new digital services including IoT, M2M services, connected and “smart” everything, and virtualized networks and services. The program is building the foundation for a common language and set of tools and resources to enable the transition to an omni-channel, customer-centric digital future.

Key features in Frameworx 15 include:

• The Customer Experience Management (CEM) ROI Calculator defines an initial methodology for measuring ROI on CEM projects. This model will enable better decision-making by accurately predicting the business benefits that service providers can expect to receive by investing in CEM.
• Updates to the Omni-channel Introductory Guide include a new maturity model and an additional set of 70+ requirements to help accelerate the discussions both internally and with suppliers to create a seamless experience across all channels of interaction with customers.
• The 360-degree view of the customer explores how a repeatable approach and common language streamlines the creation of better and more personal interactions between consumers and their service providers.
• Eight new business-oriented use cases for data analytics, bringing the total to 59, for service providers and their suppliers to simplify and accelerate data analytics projects. These use cases can be leveraged to accelerate procurement processes by acting as a requirements list, streamline internal discussions about priorities and discussions with suppliers about critical functionality, and create a model for companies to use to systematically capture their own business needs.

At TM Forum Live!, three Catalyst Projects are showcasing Customer Centricity topics: exploring customer connections with the small/medium business customers, multi-screen customer experience, and an innovative Analytics Big Data Repository.

Security & Privacy

TM Forum’s Security & Privacy Program aims to bring security and privacy to the forefront of organizational thinking, underpinning current projects in the areas of Agile Business & IT, Open Digital Ecosystem, and Customer Centricity.

Key features from this program in Frameworx 15 include:

• In the initial blueprint for a Privacy dashboard, the Privacy Management project (led by Orange), identifies the aspirations of the individual and the organization to regional variations in legislation and pulls together a model to demonstrate how privacy can be addressed to the satisfaction of all parties.
• Privacy management is now integrated into the Frameworx Engaged Party work, which to date includes the Information Framework and Business Process Framework, with the Application Framework to follow next.

TM Forum’s Security & Privacy Program also focuses on the ability to orchestrate security functions end-to-end across virtualized services and has been taken forward in the Catalyst Project ‘Security Functions in NFV’ being demonstrated At TM Forum Live!

Core Frameworks

Several updates were also made to the core frameworks within Frameworx 15, in particular, further broadening the suite to be applicable to any business and their unique digital ecosystems:

• The Supplier/Partner concept in the Information Framework has now been evolved to the Engaged Party work to reflect the wider range of partnerships, relationships and models that that are required for success within multi-industry digital ecosystems.
• Taking the Application Framework to the next level of granularity, enabling common functionality to be more rapidly and accurately identified, which maximizes re-use and consistency to further simplify application procurement.
• Key assets from the Security & Privacy and Customer Centricity programs have been incorporated across Frameworx 15 resources and assets, allowing them to be more easily used by member companies across a wide range of industry sectors.

Frameworx Conformance Certification

Adopted by 91% of the world’s largest service providers, Frameworx continues to be the most widely used blueprint for effective and efficient business operations. In fact, 82% of service providers in TM Forum’s 2014 Frameworx adoption survey now mandate Frameworx in many or all requests for proposal (RFPs), and 85% claim that Frameworx conformance has an important influence on their solution and product buying decisions. More than 85 products, solutions and implementations from 30+ companies – most recently including service providers Jawwal and Tunisie Telecom and technology suppliers CoralTree, Ericsson, Intraway and IST – have been certified as conformant to Frameworx through TM Forum’s Conformance Certification program.

For further information, both the Case Study Handbook 2015 and Perspectives 2015 showcase the role of Frameworx in helping companies across multiple industries make digital business a reality.

Get in on all of the exciting TM Forum Live! news and buzz by visiting and bookmarking the Forum’s Inform channel, a dedicated news and opinion portal for the who’s who of the digital ecosystem. The action can also be followed on Twitter using hashtag #TMFLive.

About TM Forum

TM Forum is a non-profit global industry association which helps its members transform and succeed in the digital economy. The collective experience and interests of our member community comprised of tens-of-thousands of professionals within 900+ market-leading global enterprises, service providers and technology suppliers drives everything we do, from thought-provoking research and publications, to practical guidance, collaboration programs, tools and best practices, hands-on events, and training for business and IT leaders.

Through three key programs – Agile Business and IT, Open Digital Ecosystem, and Customer Centricity – we provide a unique platform for our members to connect and collaborate with individuals and groups from around the world to solve key challenges and rapidly innovate to deliver new services, improve business agility, partner for success, reduce cost and risk, and enhance customer value and loyalty. To learn more about the Forum and join our digital journey as a valued member and collaborator, please visit www.tmforum.org. 

Media Inquiries

March Communications
Hanah Johnson
[email protected]
+1 617 960 9875