Procurement and Onboarding Suite (IG1141)

Onboarding automation has been cited by multiple service providers, such as AT&T, Orange, Vodafone, Verizon and others, as an unexpectedly difficult challenge and a major business priority for pragmatic resolution.

This Suite highlights the challenges of onboarding automation due to:

• Different viewpoints of service providers’ operations lifecycle and vendor technology lifecycle.
• Lack of standardized taxonomy and onboarding scope to clearly define the responsibilities and to automate the hand offs between suppliers and buyers.
• Lack of standardized VNF/IT services model, resulted in fragmented markets, products and open source implementations.
• Immature service providers’ internal OSS/BSS transformation to respond effectively to the virtualization impact.

Based on the above challenges observed, the TM Forum proposed a standards-based model-driven approach that is essential to scale with the growing demand for interoperability and to evolve as technology advancement and innovation happens. The IG1141 suite advocates a future-forward architecture approach that supports the transformation journey of the service providers and specifically to address the challenges of onboarding automation. Since the completion of first version of IG1141 in 2016, we have created a suite of documents to capture our thoughts and recommendations on the VF package metadata definitions:

• IG1141 Procurement and Onboarding of Virtualization Packages highlights the challenges of onboarding automation.
• IG1141A Onboarding Automation: Package ID, Software Assets and License Management Support  addresses how virtualization in Service Providers’ networks and associated resources and services will impact the licensing models.
• IG1141C Onboarding Automation: VF Categorization and Orchestrateability provides detailed analysis and recommendation on how a standardized Virtual Function (VF) categorization and package type may help the automation of VF procurement and onboarding processes.
• IG1141M Onboarding Automation: Metrics Support R18.0.1 explains the importance of a “common metrics definition” in operation environments that are highly driven by data and policy management. This is followed by the TM Forum approach for managing such metrics. The document shows how a common metrics template (supported by an information model such as the TM Forum SID) can help speed up the onboarding process and assist with other aspects of lifecycle management for software such as license management.