TM Forum’s Catalyst rapid-development program will showcase a record 15 projects at Management World 2010 in Nice, France next month. The Catalyst program, which converts service provider challenges into prototype solutions in less than six months, will present 15 collaboratively developed solutions covering a range of key topics including managing cloud services, customer experience, analytics, mCommerce, and digital service delivery.

Communications Service Providers participating in these projects span the globe, including BT, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Swisscom, Qwest, Telstra, China Telecom, China Unicom, Zain, and many others. More than 40 suppliers are participating, including the biggest names in the business such as Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Ericsson, Huawei, and Amdocs.

Each Catalyst project comprises a multi-company team of suppliers and service providers. The team works to address requirements defined by service provider project champions. With the focus of each Catalyst driven by the service provider champion, the resulting project provides a unique view of the challenges service providers are facing, and demand innovative solutions.
Multi-company Catalyst projects typically run for 3-6 months and utilize TM Forum’s Collaborative R&D methodology, enabling service providers to have prototype solutions to their requirements in a much shorter timeframe than standard RFx and lab testing processes.

Key Facts:
The 15 Catalyst demonstrations are divided in to 6 themed areas for Management World 2010:

1. Cloud Services – Enabling the business of Cloud Services.
“Cloud Encounter “– 4 Integrated Projects addressing Cloud management scenarios
Cloud Service Broker
Inter-Cloud Service Management
Service Model
IPsphere: Bringing Quality to the Cloud

2. Revenue Management and mCommerce – Addressing revenue management challenges and new business models in a complex and changing market
Revenue Assurance Coverage Model
Developing a Scalable mCommerce Model

3. Customer Experience and Business Intelligence – Proactively managing customers and revenue to increase satisfaction and the bottom line
Standardizing Customer Experience Management
Customer Experience Management (CEM) Control Center

4. Digital Media – Profiting from Digital Media Services and New Business Models
Dynamic Content Delivery

5. Technology and Operations – Driving Operational and IT Excellence
Driving the Costs out of IPTV
Enterprise Identity Management
Successful Service Inventory Transformation
Catalog Data Driven Order Automation
Effective Sell of Advanced Network Services and Solutions

6. Defense – Applying TM Forum Best Practices and Standards to meet Defense Needs
Defense Catalyst: Rapid Communications Deployment

For a full project descriptions and lists of participating companies please visit http://www.tmforum.org/Catalysts/8342/home.html

Management World 2010 will be held at the Acropolis Convention Centre, Nice, France on May 18-20, 2010. For further details on the conference visit http://www.tmforum.org/ManagementWorld2010/7867/home.html

What the Service Provider Champions say:

Cloud Service Broker Catalyst

“The Cloud Service Broker TM Forum Catalyst provides an excellent opportunity to address the barriers to cloud adoption for enterprise customers. Whilst enterprises wish to lever value from the cloud, they are apprehensive over losing control, citing areas of concern such as IT Governance, application performance, runaway costs, inadequate security and technology lock-in. The CSB addresses this by matching cloud services to each enterprise’s needs, enforcing the right policies, and then showing how this can be backed up by an ongoing service level agreement. We believe developments of this nature will be of primary importance in future cloud services.”
John Gillam, program director, BT Global Services

IP sphere: Bringing Quality to the Cloud
“This project (IPsphere Phase 3 Field Trials) is important to Deutsche Telekom because it is essential to our development of end-to-end QoS mechanisms which will help our business departments to provide the baseline and guidelines for a full service offering towards end-to-end connectivity and application aware networking.”
Hans Joachim Einsiedler, project manager/team leader, Deutsche Telekom

“This project (IPsphere Phase 3 Field Trials) is important to Telstra because it is essential to our ongoing commitment to SDF development which is helping our business direction by providing the baseline for a full service offering through application aware networking.”
Ian Stanley, Telstra

Revenue Assurance Coverage Catalyst

“Revenue assurance coverage model that is nice recommendations for Carriers to carry out RA project, can bring benefits and lower costs, improve operational effectiveness of RA work,and enhance enterprise data quality management.”
Elvis He, China Telecom Shanghai Research Institute

“The scope of revenue assurance is quite broad and difficult to identify the areas that can generate the most ROI. The RA Coverage Model could assist us to discover a blueprint and guide us to implement the RA projects by following a systematic approach.”
Haoyang Lu, planning division, information dept, China Unicom

“The revenue assurance coverage model aims to help service providers to make better decisions based on their priorities in terms of high risk and leakage areas, as well as how to optimize their investment in RA vs. the benefits of increasing the coverage with automated controls. This model will provide a significant contribution to the RA operations and the overall business results”.
Gabriela Sobral Gil, director of revenue assurance, Telefonica Latin America

“The Revenue Assurance Coverage Model should help to answer two critical questions: Which percentage of company revenue is effectively covered by RA controls, and how to best allocate the RA resources in order to get the most return in terms of reducing risks and preventing revenue leakages”.
Idalina Vilela, head of revenue assurance, Portugal Telecom

Driving the Costs out of IPTV Catalyst

“ Video quality of experience isn’t just about how good or bad the picture looks, it’s ensuring the entire experience is a complete success – from positive interaction with customer care to the customers’ perception of swift and effective problem resolution,” said Fabien Rochette, director of gateways engineering, products and network testing, Bouygues Telecom. “As IPTV hits mainstream, scaling operational processes and cost effectively managing the entire customer experience has become increasingly critical. The TM Forum Nice Catalyst program, which demonstrates how to drive down the costs of IPTV, is helping Bouygues Telecom identify efficient practices — we get closer to our customers, and we empower customer care and operations with centralized automated systems that provide the pinpoint visibility required to assure quality of service in the home and accurately and rapidly solve problems.”

Enterprise Identity Management Catalyst
“The user management in a complex and heterogeneous OSS environment is quite difficult. TMF615 “”Operator User Management”" standardizes and simplifies the communication between a central identity management system and the OSS. The result is a minimization of the time spent for auditing and administration”
Martin Meyners, senior project manager, OSS engineering, Vodafone D2

Effective Sell of Advanced Network Services and Solutions Catalyst
“In today’s market for converged services, Qwest knows that capturing detailed design insights during the sales cycle offers valuable pricing and time-to-market benefits, stated Donald Toland, chief business architect product operations, Qwest. “By working with TM Forum, Qwest, Salesforce.com and Netformx are capitalizing on opportunities to demonstrate and evaluate these concepts.”

Customer Experience Management (CEM) Control Center Catalyst
“We see mobile broadband as a main service in Vodafone’s portfolio. Advanced modeling and measurement of customer experience with mobile broadband services lays the basis to improve our product offerings in this area with the clear goal of optimizing customer value, reducing churn and improving customer loyalty.”
Karl Wilhelm Siebert, director, regional networks & operations branch west, Vodafone