TeleManagement Forum is working closely with the ITU-T and other groups to define OSS standards for next-generation networks (NGNs)
May 18, 2005
NICE, France -- The TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) today announces it is working closely with several other industry groups including the International Telecommunications Union - Telecommunications section (ITU-T) - to define a set of specifications and standards that will reduce the complexity and cost of managing Next Generation Networks (NGNs).
The TM Forum is actively contributing several items to the effort from its own New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) program, including the Enhanced Telecom Operations Map® (eTOM), its Shared Information and Data Model (SID) and an overall architectural and business framework. The eTOM has already been endorsed as an ITU-T standard (M.3050). In addition, the TM Forum will be hosting the first face-to-face meeting of the key Industry Group players in defining the NGN Management standards - July 25-29th during the TM Forum’s Team Action Week meetings in Montreal, Canada.
The TM Forum identified the need to manage next generation networks five years ago, when it launched the NGOSS program to work on solutions. Now that the industry is coming to a consensus on the definition of NGN and the management challenges it poses, the TM Forum is working to identify which portions of NGOSS meet the emerging needs of service providers so that effective management is built in from the start.
“NGOSS is designed to work in the NGN environment of multi-vendor, multi-technology networks delivering multiple services. Because we have been actively defining solutions related to this for many years, we understand much of what it takes to manage in this environment,” explained Martin Creaner, TM Forum Vice President and Chief Technical Officer. “Our job now is to identify what best fits into the overall ITU-T picture, help identify the gaps given our background, and work with the ITU-T and other Industry Groups to fill them.”
A key element of today’s marketplace is the increasing demand for global mobility and nomadism, as end users come to expect convenience as well as functionality in their everyday communications. Services that support these aspirations are being trialled over converged network infrastructures that consist of equipment elements from multiple vendors. Next Generation Networks will offer best-of-breed high-speed transport and switching of voice, fax, data and video in an integrated, packet-based IP network. But in order to realise cost and operational efficiencies from a single IP network, operators need guidance on how to manage their deployment as effectively as possible.
NGNs of the near future will be highly complex, distributed, mission critical networks, delivering data and voice services as well as integrating legacy systems with emerging technologies. These networks need to manage a host of diverse technologies and deploy flexible, platform-independent applications.
The TM Forum recognises that there is a crucial need for global standards for Next Generation Networks. “Standardisation in the area of operational and business support systems for these networks has been fragmented at many different standards bodies and fora. However the ITU-T focus group on NGN management, sponsored by study group 4, has emerged as the focal point for the necessary standards and the TM Forum is playing a substantial role," concluded Creaner.
TeleManagement Forum
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
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NICE, France -- An estimated three to four percent of service provider revenues are spent on Operation Support Systems. Many sources report over 50% of that investment is spent on application integration. This tremendous integration cost is due in part to a lack of OSS integration standards.
TeleManagement World (TMW) Nice 2005 will mark the launch of a new TMF integration standard – the Multi-Technology Operations Systems Interface (MTOSI). This standard builds upon the successful Multi Technology Network Management (MTNM) CORBA/IDL interface and extends this work to support XML/Web Service interactions between various types of Operations Systems (The components that make up an OSS).
Lack of the appropriate standards has long prevented service provider systems from being able to manage a heterogeneous network in a consistent and cost effective manner. In their absence OSS architectures have relied upon multiple custom integrations. These, in turn, have led to inflexible platforms which have proved very expensive to maintain and upgrade.
Increasingly, operators are looking to implement more flexible and cost effective operational platforms to support key business drivers such as the implementation of new IP services and greater operational efficiencies. End to end monolithic silos incorporating hardwired business logic are being replaced by horizontal layers of end-to end flow-through systems from customer facing systems at the top to the element management systems nearest the network, in which each layer manages its corresponding data and processes and communicates to the layers directly above or beneath it. This leads to the enormous business benefit of being able to separate the business logic from the massive technical complexity at the network level.
To date one of the greatest challenges to being able to achieve this abstraction at the OS level has been the requirement to communicate and manage many different sets of vendor technologies. One of the main inhibitors to overcoming this challenge has been the lack of standards supporting both the interface from an OS to an EMS and also that between OSs.
The greatest overall benefit of the MTOSI standard is to begin to standardize those interfaces and thus facilitate faster integration between the OSs and the network. For the operator this translates immediately into tangible business benefits such as reduced integration times, reduced integration costs and risks. For systems integrators and software vendors, MTOSI will enable the rapid assembly of Operation Support Systems from heterogeneous products.
In the first release of the MTOSI standard (1.0) the following functionality will be supported:
Inventory Retrieval – This capability allows an OS to retrieve all or part of the inventory known to another OS.
Inventory Notification – This capability allows an OS to send inventory update notifications to a set of interested OSs. The inventory notifications include: object creation, object deletion, object discovery, attribute value change and state changes.
Retrieval of Active Alarms – This capability allows an OS (alarm requesting OS) to request some or all of the active alarms known to another OS (target OS).
Alarm Reporting – This capability allows an OS to send alarms to a set of interested OSs. In order to receive alarms from a given OS, an alarm consuming OS must first register to receive the alarms of the given OS. A single OS could play both roles.
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NICE, France -- The TeleManagement Forum announced today that 80 companies from all facets of the telecom industry and from around the world have joined the TM Forum in the last 6 months alone, representing a 20% increase in membership to 425 members. The rapid growth in new members reflects the prestige and increasingly important role the TM Forum has taken on in guiding the telecommunications industry on operational and business management issues.
“The industry leaders joining the TM Forum come from customer, service, and network facing companies and stretch from one end of the business process map to the other -- and are universally getting involved because they are interested in taking an active role in shaping the way service providers operate,” said Jim Warner, President of the TeleManagement Forum. “Lean Operations has become synonymous with profitability and growth for service providers and the world is sitting up to take notice.”
Billing/BSS companies increasingly see the TM Forum as the organisation that can best bring them together to collaborate and network, as evidenced by the 10 new members from this sector. In addition, a very strong group of Asian service providers have signed up: China Unicom, China Telecom, Japan Telecom and Telekom Malaysia; along with Ireland’s national carrier, Eircom; and Petrobras, a large Brazilian power company.
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MORRISTOWN, N.J. -- The TeleManagement Forum (www.tmforum.org), the global industry association driving the ‘lean’ approach to telecom operations, announced today that it intends to launch a telecom operations benchmarking service in conjunction with leading fixed and mobile service providers around the world.
The benchmarking service forms a key part of the TM Forum’s Lean Operator Business Excellence Program. The aim of this latest addition to the Lean Operator program is to assist the industry’s movement to improving customer service and cutting operating costs by establishing common quantifiable and measurable standards against which service providers can assess their operational efficiency.
Working with telecom providers from North America, Europe and Asia, the TM Forum benchmarking team is defining common metrics as a first step in establishing the program. The heart of the on-going service will be data collection for these metrics from a global group of service providers. Formal data gathering will begin in August with the first benchmark results and the launch of a subscription-based report series and interactive web portal targeted for the 4th quarter.
“It is the first time there has been a centralized effort like this created for the industry, by the industry,” said Tonia Graham, TM Forum Vice Chairman and program director. “This program represents a significant step forward for the world’s service providers in their ability to use comparative data available to aid business decisions.”
“The interactive capability will provide valuable information to service providers, defining what it means to be a market leader and helping them better measure themselves against standards and against their counterparts,” added Keith Willetts, TM Forum Founder and Chairman. “In fact, service providers are seeing this as such a valuable service, we have already been requested to extend the program to allow operators to benchmark themselves not only against their own telecom peers, but also against best of breed in any industry, against players like Dell or Wal-Mart.”
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NICE, France -- The TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) today reveals the first specification from the members of its Co-operative OSS Project (CO-OP), designed to streamline mobile network operation through the simplified integration of multiple vendor network management systems (NMS).
The initial nine members of the CO-OP - Alcatel, Ericsson, Huawei, Lucent, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Nortel* and Siemens – are collaborating to reduce the complexity of provisioning NMS by defining a common approach that reduces time-to-market and operational costs for service providers.
The first published CO-OP specification details recommendations following two important NMS laboratory trials, which will be demonstrated at TeleManagement World 2005 to illustrate two Phase One CO-OP work areas in practice. These two areas concern mobile network cell border alignment known as “Cell Adjacency Management" and the definition of and correlation of underlying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from these networks. It is expected that the specification will be adopted as a standard by service providers looking to optimise the hand-off of subscribers between adjacent network cells and, respectively, the set of metrics that will promote best practice in this activity.
“We have made very rapid and constructive progress during the first six months of this project, which will improve the ease of operation and integration of the multiple vendor networks of service providers,” said Juha Lipiäinen, Chairman of the CO-OP Steering Council. “The CO-OP is also enabling service providers to maximise the value of their existing investment in network management systems as our concepts are implemented,” he continued.
In the Cell Adjacency Management demonstration, neighbouring cell data, such as handover parameters from Ericsson and Nokia radio networks, is extracted; this data is compared, and corrective actions to parameter settings is proposed to optimise network performance. Similarly, in the KPI demonstration, the common metrics from Motorola and Siemens 3G networks, and Nokia 2G networks are extracted and harmonised, and a common and comprehensive report is then produced showing the network status to the service provider. Both projects will be demonstrated at TeleManagement World as part of the Catalyst Showcase, and will utilise data from operators and show what is possible in the true mobile radio environment.
"The OSS industry has reached a tipping point in the acceleration of back office consolidation, and the network management space is no exception," said Shira Levine, Senior Research Analyst with Stratecast Partners' OSS Competitive Strategies practice. "As wireless operators face challenges such as the implementation of multi-vendor networks, increased network traffic, operator consolidation and next-generation services, reducing the integration tax between OSSs has become a priority. Standards-based approaches such as CO-OP are critical for operators to maximise the efficiency of their networks."
"Fundamentally, the specifications from the ongoing CO-OP will support and shape service provider businesses for the better, and has already demonstrated the first concrete results of driving simplicity and leanness across the whole OSS industry," said Keith Willetts, Chairman of the TM Forum. “The TM Forum is impressed by the enthusiasm and commitment from the CO-OP members in collaborating and delivering this specification in the areas of OSS architecture, performance and configuration management for mobile service providers,” he said.
In Phase Two of the CO-OP, the group will extend its work to other OPEX and CAPEX critical areas together with mobile service providers. Two key areas of focus in Phase Two will be how to arrange interoperability testing between vendors' OSS, and secondly, increased standardisation of northbound NMS interfaces. Phase Two is expected to significantly reduce the service provider costs attached to these two processes, and to yield a specification ready for implementation.
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