Eight of the world’s leading telecommunications companies (including Service Providers, vendors and professional services) have announced the launch of the collaborative ‘Product and Service Assembly’ TeleManagement Forum Catalyst project. The collaboration, which includes Atos Origin, Axiom Systems, BT, Cable & Wireless, Celona, Huawei, Oracle and TeliaSonera, aims to create a unique IT reference architecture that demonstrates how Service Providers can dramatically reduce the cost and time to market of their product and service lifecycles in the fast developing value added IP services domain.

The catalyst will prove that complex bundled services can be developed, launched and delivered to customers within just a few minutes – an approach which is faster and more flexible than anything ever achieved before. Cable and Wireless, BT and TeliaSonera’s input is also being used to better define the problem of service assembly and to ensure that the solution will work in the real world.

The Product and Service Assembly (PSA) Catalyst is part of a wider industry initiative which addresses the critical issues that today’s service providers face when trying to deliver complex bundles of services to customers rapidly and economically. By bridging the gap between OSS/BSS and Service Execution systems and devices, the PSA Catalyst will show how new products can be quickly defined, developed and launched in an integrated and efficient manner for the benefit of both the consumer and the bottom line.

The PSA reference architecture, a key element of the Catalyst demonstration, will enable new services to be easily assembled from existing or new service elements, and in turn orchestrate the necessary change within appropriate OSS/BSS applications dynamically. The approach is based around a set of co-operating product and service catalogues which are designed to allow product manager, service and network engineering and operational communities to easily collaborate. TM Forum standards are used to provide off-the-shelf integration of the OSS/BSS elements, dramatically reducing the time in which this type of architecture, utilizing multiple vendors’ products can be created and demonstrated.

“Service Provider’s network environments are often overly complex, creating a barrier to the efficient and cost-effective roll-out of new services,” said David Milham, OSS Architecture & Innovation, BT. “The creation of an IT reference architecture that more closely aligns the world of service design and creation with service execution will be a significant breakthrough because it will dramatically reduce the cost and time to market for new products and service bundles.”

“The Catalyst Program enables companies from around the world to work together and develop effective solutions to real world industry problems through using TM Forum standards,” said Martin Creaner, Vice President and CTO of the TeleManagement Forum. “This initiative looks to solve the fundamental technical issues that Service Providers face in trying to introduce new products and services in ever-shortening timeframes, so they can maintain an advantage in today’s highly competitive marketplace.“

“TeliaSonera expects the catalyst project to produce a model that can be accepted by all our partners, suppliers, developers and operational staff. We anticipate that the Product and Service Assembly catalyst will create a model which is inexpensive to deploy and which limits time consuming customizations.” Mikael Ã…hman, Director of OSS & Production.

The PSA Catalyst will be demonstrated at TeleManagement World Americas 2006 in Dallas , Texas , between December 5th and 7th 2006.

More information is available at: http://www.tmforum.com
For information about the participating companies, please go to:
www.atosorgin.com; www.axiomsystems.com; www.celona.com ; www.cableandwireless.com; www.huawei.com; www.oracle.com; www.teliasonera.com; www.bt.com

About the TeleManagement Forum
For more than 16 years, the TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) has provided leadership, strategic guidance and practical solutions to improve the management and operation of information and communications services. Through its “Lean Operator” initiative and flagship New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) program for developing, procuring and deploying operational and business support systems, the TM Forum creates collaboratively developed, industry standard solutions. These solutions, delivered through a set of guidelines and specifications, define the direction and specific roadmap to achieve business efficiency and operational flexibility – the hallmarks of the Lean Operator.

The TM Forum has 500 members in 60 countries, including incumbent and new-entrant service providers, equipment suppliers, software solution suppliers and systems integrators. For further information regarding the TM Forum, related programs and TeleManagement World, please visit www.tmforum.org.

About the TM Forum’s Catalyst Program
The Catalyst program is the TM Forum’s living lab — enabling service providers, system integrators, and hardware/software vendors to work together to solve common, critical industry challenges. The program provides an opportunity for multi-company, multi-national teams to work together in a collaborative environment with emerging technologies and capabilities to solve some of the most pressing operational and interoperability issues. And, as in the past, the Catalyst program continues to directly support the New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) program by implementing many of the NGOSS concepts and principles.