Standardized Interfaces for Management Software Are Mandatory for Cost-Effective Delivery of Advanced Services

Group Agrees To Back TM Forum’s Prosspero Program As A Way To Reduce Complexity of Integration Across the Value Chain

Nice, France – 24 May, 2007 – CIOs, CTOs and other senior executives from many of the world’s largest telecom, cable and media companies, held a summit meting at the Management World conference here 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 the following companies participated in the Summit:

“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.

For further information on Prosspero and this announcement, please visit: www.prosspero.org  

###

About the TeleManagement Forum
With approximately 600 members in 65 countries, the TM Forum is the world’s leading trade association focused on management of telecom, media & information services. The TM Forum provides leadership, strategic guidance and practical solutions to improve the way that services are created, delivered, assured and charged. Members include service providers, network operators, software suppliers, equipment suppliers and systems integrators.

The TM Forum currently facilitates over 80 technical programs and provides extensive training, conferencing and information services to its members. Through its initiatives to help providers move to 21st century ‘lean’ processes, the Forum helps its members automate business processes by deploying operational systems that will work seamlessly across various parts of the service delivery chain. The organization provides industry benchmarks, guidebooks, process and software frameworks and specific ‘plug and play’ standards. These give service providers the direction and specific roadmaps to achieve much greater business efficiency and operational flexibility.

For further information regarding the TM Forum, related programs such as the Prosspero initiative and TM Forum’s Management World conferences, please visit www.tmforum.org  


Media Contact:
Juliet Shavit
TeleManagement Forum
215-504-4272
jshavit@tmforum.org