TM Forum Standards and Services

Yayınlanma: 1 Mart 2011

Introduction
Market saturation continues in most communications markets, putting pressure on margins. Rapid growth of the “digital economy” continues to drive investment to meet service and resulting bandwidth demands. The major drivers for managers are innovating new sources of revenue, reducing operating costs, and improving customer loyalty through improved experience.

TM Forum standards and services provide the critical market tools to help service providers of all types provide innovative services on streamlined, agile, and lower cost service creation & delivery platforms.

TM Forum Standards and Services
TM Forum provides best practices, standards, guidebooks, and frameworks for the communications industry, including cable MSO, defense, media, and cloud segments. 

As the world’s leading industry association focused on enabling best-in-class IT for service providers, the Forum, through its Collaboration Program, leverages the extensive expertise of its more than 750 corporate members to provide business-critical industry standards and expertise to enable the creation, delivery, and monetization of digital services.

TM Forum Frameworx—an integrated business architecture for rationalizing operational IT, processes, and systems—is undergoing rapid adoption in the industry, with 18 of top 20 global service providers now using Frameworx. Frameworx standards take the form of documents, models, specifications, and software code.

The Frameworx suite of standards and best practices is composed of:

  • Business Process Framework (eTOM), the industry’s common process architecture for both business and functional processes
  • Information Framework (SID), a common reference model for Enterprise information that service providers, software providers, and integrators use to describe management information
  • Application Framework (TAM), a common language between service providers and their suppliers to describe systems and their functions, as well as a common way of grouping them
  • Integration Framework, a service oriented integration approach with standardized interfaces and support tools

TM Forum support services include:

  • Frameworx Conformance Certification Assessments, to simplify procurement of Frameworx-conformant products and to perform a health check on service provider Frameworx implementations through independent conformance assessments
  • Frameworx Procurement, to standardize the process of procuring Frameworx-conformant solutions
  • Business Benchmarking, to compare your business performance against peers and to gain access to critical business data
  • Training, to accelerate your career and projects with the latest on TM Forum best practices, standards, and solutions, delivered at courses throughout the world
  • Knowledge Certification, to certify your or your team’s skills with a personalized program
  • Research and Publications, to stay on top of industry trends

Business Benefits

TM Forum standards are:

  • Adopted by service providers and suppliers worldwide
  • Easy to adopt and integrate, reducing the cost of integration
  • Highly flexible, to support easy integration of new services and technologies
  • Independent of vendor implementations
  • Used to simplify RFx development, response, and support

As a result, service providers can:

  • Reduce their operational costs while maintaining and increasing revenues
  • Maximize operational efficiencies
  • Improve business agility
  • Reduce risk through industry standard approaches
  • Speed time to market for new services
  • Enable business transformation
  • Improve customer experience and reduce customer churn