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TMF unveils new initiative to drive NGOSS adoption(Total Telecom Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)It's all very well developing new standards for the next generation of networks and services, but if no one knows how to implement them then the standards may not make it beyond the lab. The TeleManagement Forum (TMF), an organisation set up to support suppliers of operational support systems to the telecoms industry, is more aware of this than most and has made a number of efforts to address the situation in its own industry. The TMF is one of the main drivers of next-generation OSS, or NGOSS. But it has acknowledged the need for increasingly more support to move from "paper-based" standards to implementations in the real world to enable interoperable OSS and BSS systems in the back office. To this end the Forum on Tuesday unveiled the Prosspero initiative at its annual event, TeleManagement World (TMW), to provide a new thrust in the adoption of standards. Also on Tuesday the TMF announced that Sun Microsystems' OSS through Java (OSSJ) initiative will now be fully integrated as a programme within the Forum, and Prosspero will be the process that provides a "1+1=5 effect from this alliance," said Keith Willetts, chairman of the TMF. Willetts said the growing complexity of services such as IPTV means that "we have to get these antediluvian back-office systems to work". He believes the NGOSS standard delivers a clear process to improve IT systems, but said the industry now needs to line up operators behind a common approach. Operators have to be "weaned off their annoying habit of wanting to customise every new piece of software," he added. The answer, says the TMF, is to wrap up NGOSS with real-world business applications. In Willetts' view the TMF/OSSJ alliance along with Prosspero will help reduce the current level of fragmentation in the industry. The role of Prosspero will be to get NGOSS standards adopted and used, and to knock down barriers to adoption. "Prosspero wants to take standards out of the lab and into the real world," added Willetts. He said Prosspero will mean building a library of APIs and interfaces and giving clear guidance on where they all fit in. The initiative is "aimed at buyers who don't really know about technology," Willetts said, with the focus placed on what the software does rather than how it does it. "We want to move to a more definitive proposition for NGOSS," he said. "Rather than just saying a vendor is compliant we will set a process in place to prove they are compliant we want to make sure it does exactly what it says on the tin." Willetts concluded that "Prosspero is not about new standards; it's about getting what we have into the market." |