A few short weeks from now, in Dallas, the TM Forum -- which gave into linguistic pressure and shortened its name from the TeleManagement Forum in July -- will host its U.S.-based conference called Management World Americas. As the industry reinvents itself to support next-generation services, so must the forum, but President Martin Creaner says the challenge for its members stays basically the same: It's the same old, same old OSS/BSS challenges, but for a new communications world. Creaner spoke with Telephony's Tim McElligott about what attendees can expect from the event.

On this year's theme:

In one word: management. Everything we do is about the management challenges as opposed to the new services themselves. The more interconnected the world becomes, the more complex the value chain becomes. And the more players that get involved in this industry, the management challenges scale linearly or maybe exponentially. [The industry] just needs to get smarter and faster in all aspects of management.

At one level it's the same old, same old. It's about the OSS/BSS challenges of the communications world we're in; it just happens to be a new communications world we're in. So it's not all about IPTV or some new services; it's all about the boring old management issues for a hugely sexy world that is changing faster than anyone can keep up with. Especially the value chain.

One of the main themes of this event is the service delivery framework and how to create a sufficiently high service provider value add platform to launch and control and monetize new services. Service providers fear that they are moving into an environment where unless they provide a big chunk of value-add for the delivery of new services, they may very well just get "flown over," like when a content provider plugs directly into Microsoft Xbox utilizing the service provider's broadband but there is no incremental new service revenue for the service provider. We have to stop the fly-over from happening at all, and the way to do that is by providing sufficient value so people want to use us in the value chain.

On addressing the challenges:

A lot of our keynote speakers in Dallas reflect the way the markets are changing. We have Time Warner Cable's Mike LaJoie [executive vice president and CTO] and Research in Motion's Robin Bienfait [CIO and overseer of RIM's BlackBerry operations]. We also have Telus and Virgin Group and the heavy-hitting technical leaders like IBM and Oracle.

We never would have had BlackBerry keynoting at a TMW before. And we really wouldn't even have had Time Warner. So you can see we are expanding, but still focused on the same problems. We have a lot on our agenda that talks about service delivery platforms: the challenges, the way people are implementing them and defining then in more detail.

Service Management itself [part of the SDP] is reaching a second bloom of youth. It was a big story in the late '90s, but the reality of how services have been managed in the last five years has been less than promised. Now, with this concept of end-to-end services, it is getting a whole new breath of life.

On other technology highlights:

There is a new push around bringing devices into the network. Until now, service providers viewed devices as something hanging off the network; they worked and were self-contained. But people are becoming increasingly aware they need to manage the devices, and not just the same way you manage mobile phones, but real-time management of devices as part of the quality value chain. This ties into the management of content and digital rights management and the overall challenges of managing content, which has become a key new area of focus for the TMF.

Also, there is a lot of traditional work areas that are growing across the industry, like the NGOSS framework, Prosspero interfaces and case studies around how to use existing NGOSS frameworks like the eTOM and [Shared Information/Data model].

On the influx of new cable members:

We have several new members and more to come. It's never easy -- and the people whose job it is to get new members on board would kill me for saying it is -- but for these cable providers it's like pushing an open door. The value proposition is very strong for the cable industry. It has 80% to 90 % of the identical problems as telecom has been addressing for years. We have a lot of valuable work just sitting, waiting for the cable industry to adopt. Then there is the 10% to 20 % of the problems that the cable industry has that telecom doesn't understand. To extract what those problems are, we have set up a cable interest group.

On this year's Catalyst program:

One Catalyst in particular, called the Content Encounter (which you can read more about in Telephony's Business Transformation Supplement on Nov. 5), is trying to highlight a whole load of new-generation service issues and figure out how to address them, issues like presence and content security. It will be a showcase for the management challenges of content. We have not solved all the problems; that would be pure smoke and mirrors to insinuate that we had. It's really more about highlighting the management challenges surrounding converged services. I would like everyone who shows up in Dallas to walk through that showcase. We want to grow it and make it a sandbox showcase for the big problems that are emerging. Hopefully we would be able to show that the problems we showcase in 2007 are easily solvable in 2008 and so on.