This is a big year for the communications and the TM Forum

Using these guidelines and principles, we have worked with a German client to provide a complete suite of services for Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs).

We started talking to the operator from a professional services point of view and provided them with counsel, planned the network and discussed the connections and interfaces with the incumbent operators. We also conferred with the MVNO partners to understand what was really behind this business and what is needed for investment. After successful cooperation at this stage, the operator decided to go with us for the equipment and we have provided them with a complete MVNO solution. The only thing we don't do is the transport layer. Everything else, starting with network core products, continuing with the application space and In line with its fast-changing and converging industry, TM Forum is broadening its remit to attract a broader membership. For a start, the leading OSS/BSS membership organization has merged with three others in 2007 - OSS/J, the Global Billing Association and IPDR.org (IP Detail Records Org) - and there may be more to come.

As TM Forum Chairman Keith Willetts and TM Forum President Martin Creaner explain in the following articles, the comfortable old days of telecom-only clubbing are over. Telcos are already joining up with other players to work in value chains delivering more than just simple voice services. Content and innovative applications are clearly the direction users and new players are driving network services and telcos are taking their place in a fast-evolving web of complementary providers. Where the industry goes TM Forum goes too. Up the protocol stack to establish standard joins between elements such as content and IP mobile devices; and out to the intra-company domain to help the new value web of players interconnect their services, systems and business models. It's a big change but the 20 year-old organization has coped with radical change before. TM Forum started life as the Network Management Forum and originally operated down amongst the nuts and bolts of the emerging data networking technologies, defining network management standards for the IP multi-vendor data networks of the day. From that vantage point, by the 1990s it had fixed its sights on helping telcos rationalize and standardize their creaking OSS environments. It went on to produce the eTOM (Enhanced Telecom Operations Map) process framework - now enjoying widespread adoption and official ITU standards recognition - and its umbrella NGOSS (New Generation Operations Systems and Software) framework. If there's an overriding theme at Management World Americas -taking place November 4-8, 2007 in Dallax, TX -- it must be content. The event is making a special feature of its Content Encounter, an Interactive Digital Media and Communications Village designed to walk visitors through a full content lifecycle from creation through to consumption. The importance of content management becomes clearer when you consider that it's likely be paid for through advertising. According to research released by private equity firm, Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Internet advertising will overtake both newspapers and TV revenue in the US by 2011, when it will garner $63 billion. By 2011 that huge cake will be divided up into a myriad of pieces as more and more players enter the market and more and more network types (fixed and wireless) are deployed to distribute the content and applications. TM Forum intends to be there.

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