Billing & OSS World: How SDF Enables Service Marketplaces

In today’s evolving communications and entertainment world, various entities are involved in delivering services and applications to end users. So there’s a need for a common language and infrastructure to be used between content providers, transport providers and retail service providers.

A group of companies are working to create a common language through the service delivery framework effort at the TeleManagement Forum. Representatives from Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, CA Inc., IBM and Microsoft discussed that effort today in the “Understanding the Service Delivery Framework” panel at Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo in Chicago.

Johanne Mayer, director, communication OSS professional services, Alcatel-Lucent, explained that the effort aims to figure out where TMF needs to extend its eTom work (which is used for business process rules, fulfillment, assurance and billing) to address the service creation, service deployment and service operations aspects of the service delivery framework. The group is also looking at the service execution portion of SDF, but outside of eTom, she said.

This work will enable the creation of marketplaces of partners to deliver new services and generate revenues, said panelist Lucia Gradinariu, senior solution strategist, communications media and entertainment business unit, CA Inc.

Rich Erickson, senior architect with AT&T Labs, mentioned that the number of applications created daily is tremendous, but “to imagine a big telecom coming out with 200 services in a day is unheard of. But it’s a very interesting phenomenon.”

AT&T, he added, wants to create environment that can support BSS/OSS functionality in a Web 2.0 environment and makes it worthwhile for third parties to create applications for AT&T’s three-screen environment. He added that while AT&T is supportive of the northbound interface work of the TMF, there is some “disconnect” between AT&T and TMF around SDF otherwise; he did not elaborate.

Eric Troup, platform strategy advisor at Microsoft, said his company is interest in pursuing the concept of a services marketplace given its move toward Software as a Service (SaaS) or “software plus service.”

He added that if a user is attached to a communications service provider, they may see 10 services, but “if they back off and take a broader view they could see 100 services.”

Beyond just creating a marketplace, however, the SDF effort also aims to address service management in some fashion.

David Mangini, global solution owner for SDP, IBM, said with the multi-partner marketplace there’s a need for service providers to redefine their business processes – everything from how they interface to and support the customer, to ensuring service quality and billing. Part of that entails the service provider to expose their networks and OSSs/BSSs to partners for quality control.

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