In order to meet the time-to-market requirements of anxious service providers, one group is trying to bring the production line concept back into the information age.

The Catalyst Program has been a staple of TeleManagement World events since at least 2001, when at TMW in Nice, France, vendors and operators got together to demonstrate the feasibility of such things as IP-VPN management, mobile IP and the World Ordering B2B Exchange DSL.

Willing companies have been using this program as a short-term, collaborative proving ground for potential solutions for operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) ever since. The program distinguishes itself from other development projects by adhering to the use of commercial off the shelf software (COTS) wherever possible. The projects are often multi-phased and range from providing a proof-of-concept for future solutions to validating specifications developed by TeleManagement Forum members. It sometimes results in TMF-approved solutions.

This December in Dallas, six project demonstrations will take place on the floor of the Adam's Mark Hotel. The projects include One Stop Service fulfillment for FTTX, an NGN OSS Blueprint, Service Oriented Architecture-based NGOSS, Single Sign On, accelerating VoIP and IMS-based services, and the one we will highlight first in this series of newsletters: Product and Service Assembly.

Brian Naughton, vice president of architecture and strategy at Axiom Systems, is team lead for this project, which is sponsored by BT Group, Cable & Wireless and TeliaSonera. Also participating in the project are ATOS Origin, Celona, Huawei and Oracle.

"The whole remit is to figure out how to better manage the whole end-to-end product lifecycle that exists in telecom today, how to streamline that process," Naughton said.

The formal pitch is that this particular project starts with a typical OSS/BSS functional architecture and shows how dynamic product and service creation can be achieved with little or no impact on customer or network facing systems, therefore reducing costs and time to market.

This project originated when Axiom, whose bread-and-butter business is based on order management, Naughton said, pitched BT--its erstwhile owner--on its concept of service assembly. Axiom's approach is to use an engine, or active catalog, outside of all the COTS in the back office that can act as an integration point between service creation and OSS/BSS.

"The whole point is to see if we can bring products to market through configuration rather than development," Naughton said.

This catalyst team will use voice over IP as a sample service, which they can take from conception to making it orderable through Siebel CRM, then implementing it using COTS and its active catalog.

"The goal is to come up with an IT architecture that allows us to realize a production line kind of concept," Naughton said. "There are lots of reasons why this is difficult to do in telecom. Mainly, there are no clear boundaries between things like OSS and BSS and service creation, and that makes the production line hard to achieve."

That functional architecture used to achieve this production-line concept is primarily an end-to-end Oracle stack, Naughton said. It uses Oracle's service delivery platform, Siebel CRM and Oracle Fusion technology. Participants use this to decouple their BSS and OSS applications from service and product specific intelligence. They will then centralize product and service rules and data and process it into a small number of lifecycle management applications and tools. This allows for easy service and product design and also helps better communicate this intelligence to the OSS and BSS.

As a sponsor of the project, BT hopes the project will result in a market--ready solution, but not right away. "I don't think we expect a complete solution at Dallas. It's quite a big problem area, and we expect a follow up Catalyst at Nice in May," said Gary Bruce, principal researcher in Research & Venturing at BT.

Bruce said ultimately all the vendors involved in Catalyst projects hope a product might be created or that one they already have might be proven, but for now it is closely tracking how the work of this group might fit in with its own project called Rapid Assembly of Services and Products, or RASP, which it has been running for about 10 months.

BT has sponsored many such catalyst projects. "It is an excellent environment for cooperation among some of the key thought leaders," Bruce said. "It's also a great mechanism for getting a job done quickly and doing some pre-standards work without getting too restrained by all the activities of the standards bodies. What you get [out if it] can always be morphed into a standards-based solution."

Which is not to say the Catalysts don't take standards into consideration. Naughton said one of the points of doing this work through the TMF is to enhance the New Generation Operations Software and Systems (NGOSS) work if needed. The industry could use more standardization of interfaces around OSS and BSS, he said, just as there are on the network facing side.

"We use the NGOSS framework for everything that we do," Naughton said, "But we are concentrating on solving the CRM to OSS integration problem."

One standard the group is not worrying about at the moment is IMS, or IP multimedia subsystem. While operators on both sides of the pond have blessed IMS, Naughton said, the group is concentrating on a service delivery platform that can bundle unique services and deliver them in weeks rather than months.

"We don't really care if the stack is IMS-based or not as long as we are working with the concept of an IT-based communications delivery platform where we can fold lots of niche offerings from either existing vendors or vendors outside of our business, like from Google or from God knows where," Naughton said.

Folding in and offering those niche services includes managing them as well. "If my OSS/BSS can't keep up with the pace of change, there's no point," Naughton said. "If I can't order them or bill for them or do assurance on them in the same timeframe that I can roll them out, I might as well not even do the services."

The demonstration will hope to show that building new services is worth the trouble.