[December 04, 2012]

Service Providers Fast-Track Frameworx Adoption to Quickly Adapt to Changing Market Demands

Management World Americas 2012 - As service providers around the globe face increasing competition, they are streamlining their businesses, maintaining margins and reducing time-to-market for scalable digital services through the use of TM Forum's (News - Alert) Frameworx suite of best practices and standards. In fact, TM Forum's latest Frameworx Adoption Survey showed that 91 percent of companies surveyed are using Frameworx to improve their operations and IT, and enable the rapid design, deployment and monetization of new services. Today, TM Forum announced the survey results along with Frameworx 12.5, the latest version of Frameworx, which adds over 60 new features to help service providers improve in key operational competency areas, such as cyber-security, customer experience, revenue management, data analytics and more.

Frameworx 12.5 Functionality Highlights

With extensive contributions from 200 members, Frameworx 12.5 includes new guidebooks, models and tools to advance service delivery, and defines new ways to measure business performance through KPIs and maturity models. The new functionality demonstrates the importance to members of TM Forum's continual enhancements of Frameworx to meet their evolving needs to solve a range of business problems, such as reducing cost and risk and strengthening IT and operations foundations.

New features include:

• Multi-Cloud Management - New packs aimed at business management and developers help service providers tackle comprehensive service level agreement (SLA) creation, implementation and monetization in multi-cloud environments, as well as provide a guide to managing effective partnerships. A specialized developer pack contains a groundbreaking Simple Management API which introduces a common set of interface patterns for exchanging management information across multiple partners as well as provides a developer environment that can be used to add the Simple Management API to any service.
• Customer Experience Management (CEM) - According to TM Forum's survey, 75 percent of respondents noted that Frameworx is important for improving customer service and introducing new products. The new Customer Experience Guidebook outlines key principles in implementing CEM programs in service providers. It includes the roadmap for developing CEM, definitions of customer centric processes, and descriptions of how customer experience is best measured and managed. The guidebook also contains a new maturity model that service providers can use to assess their CEM programs, and nearly 250 metrics for measuring customer experience.
• Revenue Management - A new guide for revenue assurance quantifies the financial impact of revenue assurance activities. In addition, a new model for fraud provides a comprehensive view and classification system to help service providers understand, identify and quickly mitigate the most prevalent breaches.
• Managing Partnerships- Because managing partnerships is a key to success in the digital world, a new guide summarizes how to develop successful and sustainable partnerships with managed service providers in the digital economy.
• Security Management - The security capabilities of Frameworx get a major boost with a new model for the industry that makes security measureable through KPIs focused on patch management, mobile device management and human factors management. With these KPIs, security can be measured within an enterprise and defined as part of contract terms and SLAs between partners.
• Product Lifecycle Management - This introductory guide contains a set of best practices to be used to design, develop, deploy and maintain the products and related services and resources that a communication service provider depends upon for sustainability and profitability.

• The Business Process Framework (eTOM) - new customer relationship management flows, ITIL linkages and supplier/partner updates
• The Information Framework (SID) - new unified catalog model, security vulnerability scoring, performance management and supplier/partner updates
• The Application Framework (TAM) - a new user's guide; updates to several customer and sales and marketing areas

"Frameworx reduces IT and operational cost, and eases integration efforts which ultimately result in agile platforms and explains why 83 percent of our survey respondents are telling us that Frameworx plays an important role in enabling the deployment of new services," said Martin Creaner, president and CEO, TM Forum. "The features we've included in Frameworx 12.5 are strongly focused on core areas such as CEM, cyber-security and revenue management which help service providers take advantage of market opportunities-no matter where they are in their digital services journey. These enhancements are the next stage in TM Forum's mission to provide the industry with the necessary tools to create, launch and manage services today and tomorrow."

Conformance to Frameworx Helps Build Agile (News - Alert) Platforms

Today, service providers are reducing cost and risk by mandating Conformance to Frameworx during procurement. In fact, TM Forum's latest Frameworx Adoption Survey showed that 72 percent of companies report they mandate Frameworx at this time, versus 63 percent in November of 2011.

TM Forum Frameworx Conformance Certification reports allow buyers and sellers of Frameworx conformant products and solutions to come to the table with a detailed understanding of the scope and degree of conformance in their environment. Not only does Conformance reduce the costs and risks associated with both procurement and integration, it ultimately allows investments made today in non-reusable customization to be saved or re-directed toward innovation and competitive differentiation. Currently, over 20 companies have certified more than 50 solutions, products and implementations of Frameworx.

Real World Examples of Frameworx in Action

Indeed, Frameworx plays a critical role in TM Forum's commitment to help its members make the transition to digital services. For real-world examples of how service providers are using Frameworx in many different situations to reduce costs and time-to market, please see TM Forum's latest Case Study Handbook. This free publication features 16 stories of innovation and success from leading global service providers such as: Celcom Axiata, China Mobile, France Telecom-Orange, Hughes Telematics, Inc., Media Networks, Mobily, PT SAPO (News - Alert), Reliance 3G, Telekom Malaysia, Telefónica Latin America, Telstra, TTNET, UPC Netherlands and many more.

TM Forum released Frameworx 12.5 along with its Frameworx adoption survey results today at Management World Americas. Separately TM Forum also announced the formation of an Open Digital Economy Steering Group and the appointment of several new Board members from across the digital services ecosystem. Please see TM Forum's News Room for the latest news from Management World Americas and more.

About TM Forum

TM Forum is a global, non-profit association focused on enabling service provider agility and innovation. As an established thought-leader in complex service management, the Forum serves as a unifying force across industries, enabling more than 900 member companies to solve critical business issues through access to a wealth of knowledge, practical tools, best practices and standards.

The Forum provides a fair and safe environment for collaboration across the value-chain to overcome the barriers to a vibrant, open digital economy. We help member companies of all sizes gain a competitive edge by enabling efficiency and agility in their IT and operations while protecting competitive differentiation. For more information about TM Forum, visit www.tmforum.org.

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