Catalyst for Change

TMF labs focus on service delivery

Last year, six Catalyst projects involving 30 companies were demonstrated at December’s TeleManagement World Dallas. Centered on the theme of enabling next-generation service delivery through service-oriented architecture (SOA) and IMS, topics included VoIP, IPTV, security and others.

The “NGN OSS Blueprint” tackled France Telecom’s need to bridge a number of domains and kinds of networks to deliver multimedia, content-driven services. The solution spanned service creation through to product catalog representation, ordering, fulfillment, and subscriber parameter management and usage. The end-to-end OSS solution will be prototyped and implemented to support a weather alert notification service for residential customers.

Sanjay Mewada, vice president of strategy at participant NetCracker Technology Corp., says one of the key objectives was to build an open, modular, configurable system that included open APIs between applications like provisioning and inventory. “A carrier like France Telecom needs to be able to revoke services and change out back-office services at will without facing a major systemic overhaul,” he says. Services are no longer hardwired, and the back office has to keep pace.

The project also focused on how IMS and SOA play out in the OSS infrastructure. “Currently, there’s a gap between the back-office OSS and the network elements like subscriber management,” he says. “We want to make sure to bridge the gap.”

In a similar vein, the “Product and Service Assembly Line” project brought together BT Group, Cable & Wireless plc and TeliaSonera with Axiom Systems, Oracle Corp. and other vendors to investigate and prove an OSS/IT architecture that can support the factory agility needed to reduce production costs and speed time-to-market. This project also investigates how OSS/BSS can embrace a service creation environment paradigm that can join operational and service execution environments.

Drilling down to a specific service, the “Accelerating VoIP and IMS” project looked to architect, build and test a full end-to-end service fulfillment, delivery and assurance environment for SIP-based VoIP, based on IMS and SOA.

As VoIP moves into the mainstream, and competitive pressures intensify, service providers must look carefully at how service fulfillment solutions can enhance VoIP business models.

Click to Enlarge The AVIS Catalyst project addresses the process for providing service provider customers with consumer VoIP. In addition to core service configuration and activation, and resource provisioning, additional functions are added for customer self-service, end-provisioning assurance with links to billing, and proactive performance monitoring.

“New ideas and industrial specifications like IMS have to be smoothly integrated into the consistent process of forming a new generation of networks and systems for us,” says Vladimir Belenkovich, CEO at project sponsor BSB, a Russian VoIP service provider.

In a fourth project, Chunghwa Telecom Co. Ltd., Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others worked on enabling one-stop-shopping for integrated IPTV services, by applying emerging standards such as New Generation OSS (NGOSS) for IPTV fulfillment. It also demonstrated how the NGOSS principles can be used to improve IPTV fulfillment processes and share information among processes.

“Our key goal is to provide services efficiently to our customers, and our operations support system must comply with NGOSS in order to achieve this,” says Lu Shyue-Ching, president of Chunghwa Telecom. “We will develop NGOSS-compliant operations support system as well as software platforms. When the platform becomes operational, it will accelerate Chunghwa Telecom’s new service offering, reduce service costs and provide one-stop-shopping of integrated IT services.”

Meanwhile, Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Telefonica Moviles España and others tackled the problem of security and how to enable a single sign-on across multiple applications and platforms. Using open standards, the group showed it could increase security while lowering the cost of rolling out or running network management systems.

And finally, NTT Corp. sponsored “Realizing SOA-based NGOSS,” which implemented the core principles of the emerging NGOSS Technology Neutral Architecture based on SOA, which translates into end-to-end process management for service fulfillment and service assurance.

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