TM Forum Announces Major New Program Aimed at Large-Scale Buyers

UK Government the first to announce membership

Morristown, NJ – May 21st, 2008 – The TM Forum announced today that it has been working with the UK Government to establish a new industry program aimed at serving the procurement needs of large-scale end-user organizations. These buyers purchase IT and communications technology on a scale equivalent to many service providers and as such many of the Forum’s standards and guidelines and best practices are directly applicable.

The TM Forum has traditionally mainly served the needs of the telecom industry. However, with growing convergence of technologies spurring a major change in the demarcation lines between telecom, cable, media and web players that position is changing very quickly. The same underlying driver, technology convergence, is also changing the picture for many large-scale consumers of communications and IT technologies. No longer are these separate strands of their procurement requirements, the needs for an integrated procurement approach are rising with the advent of convergent approaches such as: Service Oriented computing architectures (SOA), all IP networking, and advanced Service Delivery Platforms.

The needs of large scale service providers are becoming indistinguishable from the needs of large-scale users such as government departments, defense industries, aerospace and financial services industries.

Andrew Bull Head of Infrastructure, Strategy and Architecture for the UK’s Revenue and Customs departments commented “We need to ensure the best value for money for UK taxpayers in our investments in IT and communications. Following international standards is one of the ways we can do that and we are delighted to be trail-blazing a new approach to working with an international trade association like the TM Forum. We hope other governments and large scale buyers will follow our lead.”

Martin Creaner, TM Forum President said “This is a natural extension of our work with service providers around the world – convergence is making the needs of users and service providers ever more aligned. Standards allow economies of scale that these ultra large buyers want to tap into. We are delighted to establish a new program aimed at meeting these needs.” The new program is expected to focus on ensuring that clear procurement guides can be developed to help large-scale buyers drive to standards in their procurements and market education.”

An initial meeting to launch the “Large Scale Buyers” program is going to be held at the TM Forum Management World, in Nice on the 21st at 1pm in the Euterpe room. The meeting is Open to all conference attendees.

About the TM Forum
With almost 700 members in 72 countries, the TM Forum is the world’s leading trade association focused on management of information, communications and entertainment services. The Forum provides leadership, strategic guidance and practical solutions to improve the way that services are created, delivered, assured and charged. Members include the majority of the world’s service providers, network operators, software suppliers, equipment suppliers and systems integrators.

The Forum currently facilitates over 80 technical programs and provides extensive training, conferencing and information services to its members. Through its initiatives to help providers move to 21st century ‘lean’ processes, the Forum helps its members automate business processes by deploying operational systems that will work seamlessly across various parts of the service delivery chain. The organization provides industry benchmarks, guidebooks, process and software frameworks and specific ‘plug and play’ standards. These give service providers the direction and specific roadmaps to achieve much greater business efficiency and operational flexibility.

For further information regarding the TM Forum, related programs such as the Prosspero initiative and its Management World conferences, please visit www.tmforum.org