Innovative Service Delivery Solutions Drive Communications Service Provider Revenues

MORRISTOWN, NJ, April 30, 2009 –TM Forum, the world’s premier industry group focused on business effectiveness for the communications and media sectors, revealed today the innovative service delivery solutions that will be demonstrated in the exclusive Forumville innovation zone at the Forum’s flagship Management World conference (4-8 May 2009, Nice, France).

Service Innovation is one of six key strategies presented by the Forum to combat the economic downturn and prepare the industry for the future. In a world where communications service providers face the continual challenge of maintaining profitability for increasingly competitive and diverse services, TM Forum is leading the way in improving business effectiveness. Through leadership and collaboration, the Forum is delivering the standards and best practices that underpin automation, reduce OpEx and customer churn, and allow service providers to adapt to new business models.

According to Martin Creaner, President and COO, TM Forum, "Forumville brings together leading industry experts in a series of live Technology Catalyst and Content Encounter demos, providing examples of the innovation and rapid solution development only possible through collaboration. Together with business and technical presentations focused on implementation of TM Forum standards, Forumville will offer conference delegates a one-stop-shop for essential transformation tools.”

Service Innovation — Getting New Services to Market Faster

In the Service Innovation Zone, three Technology Catalyst project demonstrations will showcase multi-vendor solutions that enable new services to be created quickly and cost effectively across multiple service providers and business partners.

The Service Model Catalyst demonstrates through a real use case that the best way to optimize service assembly is to apply a consistent model to the definition of IT, telecom, and Web service components prior to their assembly. Using the TM Forum’s standards and frameworks, service providers can improve their efficiency when creating complex services; reduce roll-out costs for converged services; and increase their business agility.

“As Qwest moves towards more convergent-based services, the ability to increase the speed and cost efficiency of rolling out new services is ever more critical,” said Don Toland, Chief Business Architect at Qwest. “The Service Model Catalyst is helping us to explore ways to establish consistency in the way a service component, whether web-, telecom- or IT-based, is defined. As these components are the fundamental building blocks of a service assembly process, we expect the result of the catalyst, a common way to model any service, to prove extremely beneficial to the service provider community as a whole.”

The Transition to Greenfield 2 Catalyst provides insight and flexibility to customer, product, and service activity by applying Product Lifecycle Management, Active Catalog, and Business Process Management techniques. Building on its earlier work, the Catalyst focuses on CRM, billing & mediation, and service assurance as part of the transition to Greenfield. The scope of the Catalyst has also expanded beyond product definition and ordering to post-ordering service and customer management.

The IPsphere Catalyst fuses best practices, standards, and guidelines for the automated deployment of IP-based information, communications, and entertainment services across a federation of global provider partners. TM Forum’s IPsphere Framework delivers a business layer for rapid service delivery, including advanced support for IP services. Using the principles of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the Framework defines mechanisms to automate offers and to purchase and provision service components among multiple stakeholders, thus enabling providers to optimize flexibility and efficiency.

The Service Innovation Zone also highlights TM Forum’s Service Delivery Framework. The program defines a generic management framework for next generation services regardless of the software or network technologies used to implement those services — whether network or IT. Within the Service Delivery Framework, profitability as well as customer experience are driven by managing the complete service lifecycle, from concept to cash, in an SOA-aligned environment.

Forumville will include two theaters, offering in-depth technology demonstrations, case studies of real-world implementations, and educational presentations. Attendees will also receive free registration to the Forum’s new online community, where members can connect to their peers and gain access to the latest industry topics and thought leadership.

The strategies and tactics unveiled in Forumville will be mirrored throughout the Management World 2009 conference, which opens with an impressive keynote lineup on Wednesday, May 6. “Forumville, along with the entire Management World conference this year, focuses on the strategies and tactics service providers need to embrace to survive. The current economic situation presents an opportunity for service providers to transform themselves to support the new business models that will prove to be essential to future growth and profitability for service providers,” added Creaner.
 
The full conference agenda, keynote and speaker details, as well as information surrounding certified training courses available in Nice are available now at /ManagementWorld2009/

Press and analysts are invited to contact Geoff Devlin, gdevlin@tmforum.org, to apply for press access to the conference.
 
To learn more please visit www.tmforum.org <http://www.tmforum.org>.

About TM Forum

With more than 700 member companies in 75 countries, TM Forum is the world’s leading industry association focused on improving business effectiveness for service providers and their suppliers. Serving the information, communications and entertainment industries, the Forum provides practical solutions, guidance and leadership to transform the way that digital services are created, delivered and charged. Members include the world’s largest service providers, cable and network operators, software suppliers, equipment suppliers and systems integrators.

TM Forum provides a wide range of information and support to help its members reduce the costs and risks associated with creating and delivering profitable services. These include industry research and benchmarks, technology roadmaps, best practice guidebooks, software standards and interfaces, as well as certified training, conferences and publications. The Forum also provides its member community with extensive marketing and networking opportunities, enabling business with new customers and partners.

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