Service Management Vendors Focus on Plug-and-Play
HP has joined 10 other service provider vendors in the Integrated Multi-Service Management (IMSM) initiative, a project aimed at delivering plug-and-play capabilities to server providers. The ISMS initiative is one of three projects recently announced by the TeleManagement Forum. It is sponsored by MediaOne Lab as part of the TeleManagement Forum's Catalyst Projects, intended to lead to the development of a new generation of operations systems and software. The new approach aims to dramatically reduce the time and cost of developing and deploying business systems for managing communications and information networks and services.
Organizations participating in the ISMS, in addition to HP, are Active Software, Cambio, Cisco, Concord Communications, Information & Graphics Systems, MediaOne, Newbridge Networks, Nortel Network Clarify eBusiness Applications, Portal and Syndesis.
Based on the plug-and-play architectural guidelines being developed by the TeleManagement Forum, the IMSM initiative is focusing on ease of integration, cost effectiveness and flexibility in combining next-generation network services. The IMSM initiative builds on an existing integrated service management solution developed for ATM and frame relay. The architectural framework uses a workflow-based process engine, a common information bus and a common information model.
The first open operations solution was showcased at TeleManagement World, held from May 22 to 25 in Nice, France. The demonstration showed flow-through automated provisioning, including circuit assignment and activation for an ATM circuit crossing Cisco and Netbridge network domains.