Quite a Catalyst

Now this is a huge project and a major catalyst: Eight leading telecommunications companies have announced the launch of the collaborative “Product and Service Assembly TeleManagement Forum Catalyst” project. The Catalyst Eight include Atos Origin, Axiom Systems, BT, Cable and Wireless, Celona, Huawei, Oracle and TeliaSonera.

The project goal as stated “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 seeks to create complex bundled services that can be developed, launched and delivered to customers within just a few minutes. While certain creative and technological aspects will be handled by Atos, Axiom, Celona, Huawei and Oracle, the input of Cable and Wireless, BT and TeliaSonera will reportedly go toward “better defining the problem of service assembly and to ensure that the solution will work in the real world.”

The Product and Service Assembly Catalyst is part of a wider industry initiative which seeks to address issues of today’s service providers in delivering complex bundles of services to customers rapidly and economically.

According to plans, PSA reference architecture will enable new services to be easily assembled from extant or new service elements, and in turn orchestrate the necessary change within appropriate OSS/BSS applications dynamically.

The PSA Catalyst will be demonstrated at the TeleManagement World Americas 2006 show in Dallas, Texas, running December 5 to 7.

For 16 years, the TeleManagement Forum has provided strategic guidance and solutions to improve the management and operation of information and communications services. The TM Forum now has 500 members in 60 countries, including incumbent and new-entrant service providers, equipment suppliers, software solution suppliers and systems integrators. The Catalyst program is dubbed “the TM Forum’s living lab.”