The intent of the Services over IP (SoIP) Business Agreement is to deliver a set of common business requirements needed to support the operational functions in managing and monitoring both the physical, logical resources and the specifications of their corresponding Customer Facing Services and Resource Facing Services Management Interfaces. This SoIP document provides a set of requirements and use cases that the TMF modeling teams can independently build a set of coherent (service and) Resource Management Interfaces to support service providers’ SoIP offerings.

The objective of the SoIP Business Agreement is to enable carrier-grade management of Services over IP. In order to achieve this, the goal is to trigger the development and delivery of resource management interface specifications that can be used for procurement by Service Providers for SoIP Business Agreement compliant products. 

These business requirements use various NGOSS artifacts, such as eTOM, SID and Lifecycle methodology to assist with the business requirements analysis. The business focus is on:

• OSS to network management interfaces requirements for SoIP;
• Rapid, high-volume service provisioning in a multi-vendor environment;
• Reliable and interoperable service quality assurance;
• Definition, verification and enforcement of Service Level Agreements.

Within this document, very often we use VoIP application as an example to illustrate a given scenario. However, the diversity of real-time services over IP applications are huge, hence the complexity of the requirements. Examples of those services are Voice over IP, multi-media conferencing, gaming, unified communication etc. This document is intended to address requirements that are common to all those applications yet unique from the traditional voice network management. We expect the detailed modeling and interface definitions will be addressed by appropriate TMF working teams in the future

This document is targeted for the following audiences:

• OSS architects, RFI/RFP writers and reviewers in the Service Provider communities: this document provides high-level guidelines on things that ought to be considered for a scalable and interoperable OSS architecture supporting IP-based service offerings.
• RFI/RFP responders and OSS architects in the equipment/OSS vendor and value-added integrator communities: this document provides a common language and framework of what the Service Providers are looking for with regard to SoIP management.
• Standardized interface specification development teams within TM Forum and other Standards Development Organizations: this document provides the business requirements of Resource Management interfaces for IP-based service provisioning and management.