IPsphere Joins TM Forum to drive Rapid Service Creation and Delivery

Service Providers striving for rapid creation and deployment of IP-based, multi-stakeholder services will benefit from today’s announcement that IPsphere has joined TM Forum and will integrate its framework into the TM Forum's ever-expanding Service Delivery Framework program.

As part of the agreement, the IPsphere Forum will move its work programs into the TM Forum with immediate effect. The fusion of these best practices, standards and guidelines will fuel automated deployment of IP-based information, communications and entertainment services. Using the principles of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), the IPsphere Framework defines a sophisticated business layer that automates offer, purchase and provisioning of service components among multiple stakeholders. The framework also offers support for a standardized registration and discovery process, payments for resource usage and quality assurance, and interworking with session-based service environments. Complementary to that work is the TM Forum's Service Delivery Framework, which focuses on enabling control of service lifecycle management across all execution environments allowing flexibility in binding services with product catalogues. Integrating the principles and technical work of these two frameworks will create a pre-commercial testbed for pilot program testing and the demonstration of multi-vendor interoperability. According to Martin Creaner, President and CTO, TM Forum “I’m very excited about IPsphere joining forces with the TM Forum. In this increasingly converged market, the work IPsphere is doing to produce specifications to enable pan-provider business solutions, compliments the existing work of the TM Forum in relation to Service Delivery Platforms and Service Oriented Architecture. The closer alignment of these work efforts will deliver great benefits to our broad membership.” Todd Shimizu, Chairman of IPsphere, commented “Together, we create a comprehensive approach to service delivery and management that fully aligns our technology and standards with the key business and management issues of service providers. As part of TM Forum, we seek to accelerate time-to-market for these standards to give better results for all of us and better services for our customers.”