Jörg Frankenberger, head of OSS Engineering, Vodafone D2 GmbH, has been named chair of the OSS through Java™ Initiative Steering Committee. The Steering Committee establishes priorities and strategic directions for the telecommunications initiative, whose standards, guidelines, and technologies have been widely adopted by the industry.

Frankenberger heads OSS Engineering at Vodafone D2 in Germany. His department acts as a competence center for Network and Service Management for the Vodafone Group. In this capacity, Frankenberger has been instrumental in implementing standards and technologies that add efficiencies and lower integration and maintenance costs. Prior to joining Vodafone, he was in charge of Network Management Systems for GSM, IN & Services at Mannesmann-Mobilfunk.

As a member of the Initiative, Vodafone has directly contributed to OSS/J for over a year and has taken an active role in the creation of the OSS/J Service Providers Executive Roundtable, a forum where OSS/J adopters share experiences and join forces to influence the market.

“Vodafone is delighted to take a more strategic role within OSS/J,” says Frankenberger. “It is extremely important that a wide variety of carriers throughout the globe – incumbents and newcomers, wireline and wireless, broadband and cable – actively support our collaborative efforts to extend the OSS/J ecosystem and create clearer, more reliable relationships between vendors and buyers.”

This is an important milestone for the OSS/J Initiative. From the beginning, the founders of the Initiative – industry leaders with deep understanding of market requirements and trends – have sought to transform the industry by focusing on implementation issues. Now that OSS/J technology has matured and become the standard for deploying in-production OSS-aware SOA solutions, the role of service providers within the Initiative is vital to assuring strategic directions for the roadmap as well as tangible business benefits.

“This is an important milestone for the OSS/J Initiative,” says Philippe Lalande, Sun Microsystems, one of the Initiative’s founders. “From the beginning, the founders of the Initiative – industry leaders with deep understanding of market requirements and trends – have sought to help service providers find ways to regain control of their Operations Support Systems (OSS) and achieve the opportunities of the convergence era by quickly and cost-effectively introducing new products and services. Vodafone pioneered real-world deployments and leads the market towards OSS/J certified component-based solutions. For all OSS/J members, it is an honor and a privilege to have a visionary leader like Jörg Frankenberger not only guiding the Initiative, but also providing thought leadership to carriers adopting OSS/J and to a growing ecosystem of OSS/J compliant suppliers.”

As an immediate result of the increased influence of service providers adopting OSS/J technology, the Initiative has re-prioritized certain technical deliverables, and recently made available Web Services profiles for its Trouble Ticket API (JSR 91) and its OSS Common API (JSR 144).  Web Services specifications for all other OSS/J APIs will be available by April 2006.