The TeleManagement Forum today signed on its 500th member company, underscoring the tremendous momentum of the standards organization and the value of its work in the re-igniting, and now highly competitive and converging telecom market. The 500th member to join the TM Forum is MTC Group, a Middle East service provider.
“The 500 member mark is a very telling milestone for the industry. This tremendous growth the TM Forum is experiencing is a direct reflection of industry priorities – we are witnessing the maturity of the Forum’s importance to service providers as they face a rapidly changing market,” says TM Forum Founder and Chairman Keith Willetts. “Having agile, cost-effective and customer-friendly operational processes and systems is now the way to gain competitive advantage, and the 500 members of the TM Forum recognize the value of collaboration and standards to meet those challenges a timely and cost effective manner.”
The TM Forum has been leading the world’s operators to achieve profitability through standards-based operational business processes and software systems since 1988. The organization provides an open forum for multi-company industry collaboration, education, and business networking to drive the timely development of open frameworks and standards as well as creating a constructive business development environment for the industry.
“Vendors have long understood the value of standards in reducing R&D and implementation costs as well as the value the TeleManagement Forum brings to this area. We’re now seeing increasing interest among service providers in standardized processes and frameworks as they look to upgrade their back office systems to support their next-generation network infrastructures,” says Shira Levine, senior research analyst at IDC.
The TM Forum’s membership represents service providers and their suppliers around the world from six continents and 60 nations, many of whom have already integrated TM Forum standards within their companies operations or into their telecom management systems product and service offerings. The organization’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) framework for developing, procuring and deploying OSS and BSS has been implemented at such member companies as Belgacom, BT, CANTV, Korea Telecom, Covad, O2 Germany, Telecom Italia and Telstra, among many others.
The 500th member, MTC, applauds the Forum’s major milestone and elaborates on its reasons for joining the organization:
“What the telco industry needs is to move towards a plug and play hardware and software environment. This is the only way to reduce CAPEX and OPEX costs. What the TM Forum gives us are the standards for this environment,” said Dr. Al Ahmadi, Chief Strategy Officer, MTC Group. “The skilful implementation of the TM Forum supported concepts will give MTC a local plug and play capability and a transparent connectivity across its international theatre of operations.”
MTC was originally established as in 1983 in Kuwait as the first mobile operator in its region, now supplies wireless and data services in five Middle East and 14 sub-Saharan African countries to nearly 12.5 million residential and business customers.
MTC will be recognized at a 500 member milestone celebration, taking place at the TM Forum Regional Summit in Dubai being held February 27 – March 1, 2006 in the United Arab Emirates at the Hotel Hilton Dubai Jumeirah.
About the TeleManagement Forum
For more than 16 years, the TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) has provided leadership, strategic guidance and practical solutions to improve the management and operation of information and communications services. Through its “Lean Operator” initiative and flagship New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) program for developing, procuring and deploying operational and business support systems, the TM Forum creates collaboratively developed, industry standard solutions. These solutions, delivered through a set of guidelines and specifications, define the direction and specific roadmap to achieve business efficiency and operational flexibility – the hallmarks of the Lean Operator.
The TM Forum has 500 members in 60 countries, including incumbent and new-entrant service providers, equipment suppliers, software solution suppliers and systems integrators. For further information regarding the TM Forum, related programs and TeleManagement World, please visit http://www.tmforum.org.