| Open Communications Architecture Forum (OCAF) Focus Group |
| Background |
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To compete in today’s highly competitive telecommunications market, Service Providers
must continually find ways to drive costs out of their infrastructure and deliver
new innovative offerings to deliver shareholder and end user value.
There are three fundamental changes impacting and affecting the business
environment for the Telecommunications Service Provider:
- The rapid adoption and deployment of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS)
technology by enterprise customers and Service Providers to reduce the
total cost of ownership of delivering existing communications services
and new IP-based applications
- The evolution of open industry wide standards now make it possible
for Telecommunications Service Providers to purchase components for the
core network from multiple vendors and “mix and match” to achieve the
best possible price performance
- The increased involvement of the subscriber in provisioning
and administrating entitled services.
Service Providers and their key suppliers recognize the advantages posed by COTS technology
and are active in examining COTS derived total cost of ownership benefits. In most
cases the Service Provider will elect to transition in stages to the next generation
network environment adhering to industry open standards to achieve the cost of
ownership savings of mixing and matching best in class COTS hardware and software.
Numerous standards bodies and industry consortiums have established key industry standards for NGN solutions; some of the key forums include:
- ITU-T SG 13, ATIS, ETSI, TIA, 3GPP, 3GGP2, Open Mobile Alliance, IETF are leading in the
service/solutions standards
- Open Source Development Lab Carrier Grade Linux working group and the Service Availability Forum
for middleware and OS
- TMForum, ITU-T SG 4 and DMTF in the OAM space
- OSA/Parlay, Jain and other Service Creation Environments and
- Hardware platform forums such as PIC-MG and PCI-SIG
It is necessary to define a common approach that helps the suppliers navigate through the appropriate interfaces and options to deliver an open, integrated, communications platform using these standards.
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