The Software Enabled Services (SES) Management Solution activity was established to enable both traditional Communication Service Providers (CSPs), and Internet, content and media service providers to leverage the opportunities and service marketplace presented by network and IT convergence. Specifically, the objective is to provide a means to allow consistent end-to-end management and metering of services exposed by and across different service providers’ domains and technologies, such as communication, cloud or Web 2.0. The envisioned standards are intended to support business practices associated with multi-provider cooperation throughout the lifecycle of the service, and by means of lightweight design to foster wide adoption of the standard artifacts in any architecture, technology environment and service domain.

OA&M interfaces today are siloed per technology, standardized by specific SDOs or defined by vendors’ proprietary implementations. This makes the consistent management of services sourced from different domains challenging. To address this challenge, the SES Management Solution proposes an approach to enable and support consistent access to the software enabled services for OA&M tasks. The SES Management Interface (SMI) complements the functional capabilities exposed by the software component’s API with additional lifecycle management operations. And the SES design pattern, described in the SES Reference Architecture, enables reusability of services in different environments, including cloud, by manipulating the LMM.

The main objective of this paper is to position the SES Management Solution alongside the TM Forum Frameworx and to explain how Frameworx and SES Management Solution provide the business enablement of software components. To ensure SES Management Solution adoption by the Web 2.0 community, the SMI must be simple. Developers need to be able to interpret the contract and use existing tooling in that domain. The SMI is the least common denominator contract that must be supported by any SES: a very simple interface that can be easily implemented by any developer of a Managed Service even without any knowledge of TM Forum Frameworx. This interface must cover the basic low level interactions to support the three verticals of the eTOM (Fulfilment, Assurance and Billing). It is precisely the goal of the SMI to support in the most simple way information exchange for Configuration/Activation, Assurance/Performance, Accounting/Usage.

The SES pattern enables software components to participate in a TM Forum Frameworx based solution. The SES Management Solution intends to augment the TM Forum Frameworx artifacts for that purpose, and as such bridge the gap between TM Forum Frameworx and the Web 2.0 world.

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