Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 12- Brian Naughton

Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 12

	This Month's Issue:
	Standards Make A Stand

Standardizing the Process of Service Creation and Delivery for Telcos

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Let There Be Light

Luckily for service providers, this exact form of standard architecture has been in development for nearly a year under the guise of the Product and Service Assembly Initiative, or PSA. Launched as a TeleManagement Forum Catalyst program at TMW Dallas in late 2006, the PSA architecture is intended to be a complete end-to-end reference point for a rapid and agile service creation environment for telecommunications providers.

With cooperation from an industry-wide range of leading telecommunications companies, the PSA is making notable progress towards a standard architecture that promises to solve one of the critical issues facing today’s SPs.

During its first phase, PSA founding partners Atos Origin, Axiom Systems, BT, Cable & Wireless, TeliaSonera, Celona, Huawei and Oracle showcased a componentized approach to creating a VoIP product. In early 2007, Microsoft, TIBCO, Convergys and QuinetiQ joined the initiative, with the intention of demonstrating how IPTV, DSL and VoIP can be created, bundled and delivered as a triple-play product using the PSA's architecture. The reference architecture is due to be showcased at TMW Nice in May 2007.

Better Business

One of the key benefits of the PSA initiative is its ability to address product life cycle management problems. The principles of the active catalog lie at the core of the PSA’s architecture, and, because of its unique functionality, every time a new service is created successfully, each of the parameters are inventoried as options for future use among end-users of product managers. For instance, if one third of a SP’s customers have indicated that a current service to which they subscribe should be canceled within six months, the SP is able to target those customers with new services within that time frame.

Such a change would reduce their operating costs and cut time to market for new services.

For operators that have participated in the PSA, such as BT and Cable & Wireless, the lessons taken from this standardized architecture example have been invaluable. BT sees the potential that the PSA architecture has shown to make the shift from needing to continually customize IT systems across an entire network, to managing requirements so that each individual service adapts to changes automatically. Such a change would reduce their operating costs and cut time to market for new services.

Cable & Wireless have witnessed the benefits of customer control that the PSA architecture can make possible. The prospect of putting product control squarely in the hands of the customer means they get access to the services they want, when they want them, driving up customer satisfaction and reduce churn. It also means customer service costs would go down, and possibly turn into profits as telecommunications providers realize that customers will pay more for such control.

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