|
Group Agrees To Back TM Forum's Prosspero Program
(Wireless News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)
CIOs, CTOs and other senior executives from many of the world's largest
telecom, cable and media companies, held a summit meeting at the
TeleManagement World conference in Nice, France, and agreed to work
together to accelerate the availability of key management standards.
The goal of the group is to ensure suppliers are clear on what they
need - and when - so as to ensure there is a ready supply of 'off the
shelf' management software that is easier to integrate and faster to
deploy.
Executives from a range of companies participated in the Summit,
including: - AT&T - BT - China Mobile - France Telecom/Orange - NTT -
Reliance Communications - Telecom Italia - Telekom Austria -
TeliaSonera - Telstra - Time Warner Cable - UPC Broadband - Virgin
Group - Vodafone
"The advent of triple and quad-play offerings plus new entertainment
and information services are creating complex value chains which are
ever changing," explained Keith Willetts, Chairman and CEO of the TM
Forum. "To drive world-class customer service at low cost the touch
points between different companies have to be standardized and
automated. If they are not, new services will be too costly to operate
and take too long to get to market."
"In today's market, we simply don't have the time or resources to
deploy software that does not integrate quickly and easily," said Phil
Dance, CIO at BT. "We're talking about areas where there is no
competitive advantage to doing it differently. The standards exist and
the TM Forum Prosspero program ensures those standards are easy to
adopt. Now is the time for the Service Providers to send a clear signal
that standards based management systems are in everyone's best interest
and an unequivocal requirement that will drive our future behaviour."
The cost of integrating systems serves as a hidden tax - at least 5x
the value of the software costs. If service providers have to
hand-craft each interface to every system, not only is it wasteful, it
hinders their ability to focus resources on things that are more
valuable to their customers.
The Prosspero Initiative builds on existing standards for service
provider business processes and systems, but moves beyond the basic
standards definition by focusing on making implementation as easy as
possible. It offers clear implementation guides, downloadable reference
software implementations, test tools, training and even an online help
community for developers.
In using Prosspero as a vehicle to drive rapid adoption of interface
standards, the group will also investigate the creation of an industry
reference lab where the inter-working of application software can be
tested in a real network environment. "The existence of a industry
reference lab will help remove some of the ambiguity surrounding
whether interfaces really work, and will also act as a 'sandbox' for
service providers and vendors to test out new concepts," explained Mark
Francis, VP of Enterprise Architecture, AT&T.
The group's next steps are to prioritize which interface standards are
most critically needed by the industry and to explore how to work in
partnership with the supply side of the industry to move the reference
lab from concept to reality.
With approximately 600 members in 65 countries, the TM Forum is an
international trade association focused on management of telecom, media
& information services.
Prosspero information: www.prosspero.org.
TM Forum: www.tmforum.org.
((Comments on this story may be sent to newsdesk@10meters.com))
((Distributed on behalf of 10Meters via M2 Communications Ltd -
http://www.m2.com))
((10Meters - http://www.10meters.com))
Copyright 2007 Wireless News
[ Back To asia.tmcnet.com's Homepage ]
|
