AVIS may be the market leader in rental cars, but as a telecom acronym it stands for Accelerating VoIP and IMS-based Services. And AVIS is the TeleManagement Forum Catalyst project, now in its second phase, that drew the attention of Vladimir Belenkovitch, CEO of BSB, a competitive service provider in and around Moscow.

BSB is now co-sponsoring the project along with CANTV.NET. "I jumped at the chance to do it because the automation of VoIP is well within our core competency," Belenkovitch said.

He also said that in general, Catalyst projects and the TMF frameworks used to conduct them provide a view of the big picture. This project in particular may be focused on accelerating and automating the fulfillment process for VoIP services, but it also demonstrates the role of the service broker--or service oriented architecture service bus--enhancements to self-service portals for activation and configuration and new functionality for provisioning service level agreement (SLA) management in the enhanced Telecom Operations Map.

This second phase of the project follows Phase 1 where CA-Wily, CANTV.NET, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Lucent Technologies, MetaSolv Software and Progress Software demonstrated flow through fulfillment of VoIP services originating from a Web portal and configuring the required network elements. In Dallas next week, the group will be working with the added element of IMS-based network components from Lucent.

The new elements will allow the group to perform several new call scenarios including on-net calls between SIP softphones, between SIP softphones and the PSTN, simultaneous ringing and call forwarding to SIP or PSTN endpoints.

After a couple of unsuccessful attempts through other catalyst projects to incorporate a service bus architecture, AVIS is bringing the idea back. Selected transactions will be migrated to the service bus while others will still be Java messaging services implementation.

The service bus architecture is partly what piqued Belenkovitch's interest. His four-year-old company, which he describes as small but innovative, is an alternative carrier that joined the TMF in 2002 as Russia's first commercial business member, preceded only by St. Petersburg State University.

"I felt the forum's specifications could help us a lot and I started evangelizing this in Russia," Belenkovitch said. "Now eight members from Russia have joined--some of them from my propaganda."

He said through the course of his career, he has read many technical specifications, mostly stuffy and too formal. But after reading "The Lean Communications Provider" by TMF Chairman Keith Willetts and then forum CEO and president Elizabeth Adams, he got addicted to TMF documentation.

"These were something I could read," Belenkovitch said. "I was reading them like a thriller. I couldn't wait to see what was next. They help build the new vision of the telecom world and I recognized my own world in these specs."

So after participation in an unsuccessful Catalyst project, Belenkovitch was itching for another. AVIS provides him with the view of the working SOA he wanted and demonstrates that IMS is not a architecture a company should race to at the cost of its existing network, but rather a technology that can extend existing networks.

"When I saw this second phase and how people are integrating IMS into something they already have, I was interested not only in the results but the methodology," Belenkovitch said. "I felt I needed to sponsor this to show that just because there is a new technology doesn't mean you just throw away what you already have, which I have seen several times. Plus, I want to be part of the new IMS process in Russia and this opens the door for me."

At this stage in Russia, IMS is closely related to fixed/mobile convergence, but primarily from a business and process consolidation standpoint rather than for building new consumer services, Belenkovitch said. In Phase 3, if there is one, he would like to see more service bus implementations and more interaction between OSS components through the service bus.

Vadim Rosenberg, director of marketing for the telecommunications business unit of CA's Wily Technology, said the group is going through the planning stages for the next phase and hopes to have a proposal for the Catalyst committee at TMW in Dallas.

"One of the options we are considering for Phase 3 is working with Lucent to actually monitor their IMS infrastructure, in which case the AVIS team really needs to deliver on the promise of the end-to-end infrastructure," Rosenberg said. So far, the Catalyst is not quite an end-to-end solution, he said. 

Wily specializes in application performance management and managing the customer experience. The company's role in this Catalyst project is monitoring the self-service portals and the order management and provisioning processes.

So if you're interested in learning how these companies are approaching the fulfillment of consumer VoIP services based on IMS and connected through Web services or a service bus while monitoring and managing the processes and service level agreements, go to your nearest AVIS counter at TMW.