Contacts: Chris Ballard, Head of the Device Sector, TM Forum
Bhanu Nallagonda, Program Manager, End-User Device Management, TM Forum
What is it about? The TM Forum has formed an interest group to investigate the feasibility of a common approach to the management of user devices such as mobile handsets, set-top boxes, and home gateways. It will look at management approaches currently used in the mobile, cable and consumer electronics field to come up with a lightweight, simple approach to manage all devices as quickly as possible. The interest group is yet another aspect of the Forum’s focus on the end-to-end service value chain -- reaching out to address management needs from content source to the user’s device.
The group will address the end-to-end requirements to manage remote end-user devices, for relevant stakeholders -- major device players, service providers, content providers, and large corporate enterprises. Part of this will be to examine the tradeoff between flexibility for rapid services definition and rollout, and optimizing the cost and efficacy of centralized control, as well as issues on the ownership of that control.
Why is the Forum doing this? When communications, music and TV were all separate sectors, different approaches to managing the end-user devices that delivered them worked just fine. In many cases there was no management because with broadcast media, it was fairly easy to separate any problems with the service, like TV signals, from the TV set device. But in the “any content on any network on any device” converging world, where information and entertainment is personalized to the user, that approach no longer works.
Today’s online information, communications and entertainment services are complex and there is a growing need to be able to deliver service quality to the user, on whatever the device the service is being consumed – a TV, PC, games console or mobile handset. There is significant momentum building to reduce the amount of fragmentation in the market as this is a major barrier to the success of content and information-based services and the further development of one-one advertising.
Team focus. MIT Media Labs guru Dr David Clark has estimated there could be up to 1 trillion devices in the market in 15-20 years time. Each being managed and controlled in different ways would be impossible. So the team will address questions such as:
- How can a common approach be forged across the variety of devices?
- What is the demarcation point between devices and the network?
- Where should the management intelligence reside?
- How can we help spur fixed-mobile convergence?
- How can we more effectively link management of these devices with the way that companies want to manage their businesses and services end-to-end?
The objective is to ensure that “any content, anywhere, anytime” actually works reliably and delivers what the customer wants. To achieve this will require universal management commonality across devices – is the device working correctly or not? Is it on or off? And it is important to address more complex issues such as a common way to measure end-user satisfaction. This must be a commercially-driven, not technically-driven, approach since the cost of adding management functionality to devices must be justified by the benefit to the user.
Today the management of devices is as “stove-piped” as any other technology in our industry. There will always be device-specific issues to manage and device-specific ways of reaching into the device. However, it is necessary to deliver service management across multiple infrastructures. We need a universal approach to manage service issues such as service quality management (SQM).
This End-User Device Management interest group is considering standard interfaces, processes and data formats that could allow converged management of the full variety of end-user devices. This will enable enterprises and providers to bring services to market faster and lower their operational costs.
Industry liaisons supporting the program. The interest group will also look at forming liaisons that the TM Forum can leverage to complement existing device-specific management approaches for end-user device management pillars. To what extent will it be possible to define a common approach (across the pillars) for demarcation between end-user device equipment and network infrastructure equipment? Potential pillars may include:
As Content Encounter demonstrated (see here), it is possible to move information and content seamlessly from end-device to end-device. The device does not determine the service. The day is gone when a TV offered only television, a computer - only software, an Xbox - only games, and a mobile device - only calls. The management of devices has to move to a universal approach if users are going to be able to forget about the internal differences of each.
So while these pillars exist, and also mediation/abstraction technologies can give us some interim way of coping with the variability of devices out there, they only need to be different where absolutely necessary – e.g. where the underlying transport protocols are different or where there are some device specific characteristics that need to be satisfied.
TM Forum members can self-subscribe to the End User Device Management workspace by logging into www.tmforum.org/cws.
Non-members can communicate with the End-User Device Management team using the public discussion forum here: http://tmforum.org/community/forums/48/ShowForum.aspx