TM Forum Forms SP Council

MORRISTOWN, N.J. -- The TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) announced today the formation of a new interest group of powerful service providers, whose charter is to provide a vehicle for obtaining agreement on cross-industry issues and requirements. The group's consensus will not only help prioritize TM Forum activities but will also provide guidance to the industry on coalescing around a common set of business process and technological frameworks.

"In today's tough market, telecom suppliers are looking for clear and consistent buying signals from service providers in order to give them the confidence to begin investing once more for future success", said Keith Willetts, Chairman of the TeleManagement Forum. "The Service Provider Leadership Council and TM Forum's recently announced NGOSS Release 3.0 framework specifications provide a very clear beacon that suppliers can now steer towards".

The initial members of the SPLC comprise some of the most important Service Providers in the industry including: Vodafone, BT, Orange, NTT, Verizon, Telecom Italia, ATT and Telstra. They have set up the SPLC with the objectives of providing advice and direction to the TM Forum board on the prioritization of TM Forum activities to meet Service Provider needs, and sharing with the vendor community a common view of the most pressing OSS/BSS issues to be resolved.

Phil Holmes, chief technology officer at BTexact, BT's research, technology and IT operations business, said: "I believe that this type of cooperation is exactly what the industry needs at this critical point. Many of the challenges that BT faces today in the OSS/BSS arena are similar, if not identical, to the problems that other large service providers face around the world. We see the SPLC not only as a vehicle for helping to focus the industry on the most important problems, but also as an interest group where we can share and in turn learn from the experiences of peer companies."

The SPLC membership is open to all Service Provider members of the TeleManagement Forum. It plans to release it's first output by the end of Q2 - 2003 which will be a set of boilerplate text which Service Providers can cut and paste into their RFI/RFP's to request solutions compliant to the NGOSS 3.0 specifications.

TeleManagement Forum