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OSS/J - In Perfect Harmony
Since joining forces last year, OSS/J and the TM Forum are proving that by combining their strengths, not only the OSS community, but the communications industry as a whole, has much to gain. Doug Strombom takes a look over the past twelve months
The OSS through Java Initiative’s (OSS/J) decision in early 2006 to join with the TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) appears to have been a good one. OSS/J is a rising star within the TM Forum, making a strong contribution to the technical programme there, and increasing its influence on the TM Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) standards-making efforts.
In January 2006, when OSS/J first discussed joining the TM Forum at OSS/J’s face-to-face meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany, there was some trepidation that the group’s strong focus on standards-making might be diluted within the much larger organisation. But the following day when the idea of merging OSS/J into TM Forum was presented to the telecommunications service providers present at the OSS/J Service Provider Roundtable, it was greeted with acclaim. The move would put to rest the concern by service providers that there are too many different standards and standards-making organizations within the telecommunications industry. By removing the uncertainty factor of having multiple competing standards, the service providers agreed that it was to everyone’s benefit to widely adopt a single OSS integration standard.
The path to the standardisation of OSS interfaces has not been smooth. With hundreds of telecommunications service providers worldwide, not to mention hundreds of OSS vendors and system integrators, reaching agreement on common standards can be a real challenge. The proverbial chicken-and-egg problem is often cited, with service providers agreeing to adopt open standards only when sufficient OSS vendors support them, and OSS vendors agreeing to provide open standards only when sufficient service providers agree on which standards they require. Because there are so many players in telecommunications, it is much more difficult to agree on standards than in more concentrated and vertically-integrated industries like the automotive industry.
That’s why industry standards bodies like TM Forum are so important, and it helps that the TM Forum has plenty of prestige within the telecommunications industry. Its members include approximately 600 telecommunications service providers, OSS vendors and system integrators. When the TM Forum says “this is the standard that our members want to adopt,” it is a very significant statement.
The TM Forum can justly claim that its choice of standards is impartial and in the best interests of the whole telecommunications industry. It is an open group, with a Board that is elected by its corporate members, with councils representing service providers, vendors and system integrators, respectively. That Board appoints a Technical Committee to sort through industry best practices and make the final determination on standards issues. Within the TM Forum, standards-making programmes like OSS/J perform their work at the behest of the Technical Committee. The Technical Committee’s overarching goal is to define NGOSS, into which OSS/J fits neatly as an implementation-oriented interface standard. These open governance mechanisms of the TM Forum are helping the OSS industry find a unified voice in favour of standardisation.
An immediate result of OSS/J uniting with the TM Forum was an upsurge in OSS/J membership. With OSS/J now under the auspices of the TM Forum, more industry participants were assured about the impartiality of OSS/J. Major OSS players like HP and integrators like TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) added their considerable industry weight and technical resources to the development and maintenance of OSS/J APIs. OSS/J development is performed under the open Java Community Process (JCP). Each API project is led by a Spec Lead from an industry insider, and participation on the project is open to other companies who can contribute their requirements and technical support. In the parlance of the JCP, each API project is called a “JSR” (Java Specification Request). HP took on the new OSS/J Fault Management API. TCS began to participate by constructing Reference Implementations (RIs) for many OSS/J APIs.
Membership in the OSS/J Programme at TM Forum is open to new members who are willing to make a technical contribution to the development of OSS/J APIs. The TM Forum assigned the job of negotiating technical contributions and following up on those promises throughout the year to a dedicated Technical Programme Manager. This important job went to Antonio Plutino, who has successfully managed OSS/J deliverables over the years. Of course, one does not have to be an OSS/J member in order to contribute to API standards: many individuals and companies contribute to JSRs at the invitation of the Spec Leads.
A second major impact of moving OSS/J into the TM Forum relates to the professionalism and governance of TM Forum’s standards-making process. OSS/J subjects itself to a formal JCP process because the JCP is a tried-and-true development process with build-in checks and balances. Because the JCP is an open process involving key experts from the industry, the quality of inputs to the JSRs is very high. And the review steps that are inherent in the JCP process help to ensure that many reviewers validate the approach taken to define interfaces and the quality of the resulting specifications. This additional governance has breathed fresh air into the TM Forum’s standardisation process, as the TM Forum itself has begun to adopt governance that can stand up to ever greater scrutiny.
OSS/J helped introduce advanced techniques for producing interface specifications such as use of a common information model and model-driven tooling. All of the new OSS/J APIs have been specified using the Core Business Entities (CBE) from the TM Forum’s Shared Information Data (SID) model. This helps to ensure compatibility between APIs developed according to the OSS/J standard. In addition, OSS/J interfaces are built using Tigerstripe Workbench, a model-driven tool developed by Tigerstripe, an OSS/J member. This software allows JSRs to design an abstract specification of an interface, and then to generate specific code in XML, Java and WSDL, in order to support the different deployment profiles required by OSS/J. The use of a common model and model-driven tools has greatly sped up the development time and quality of OSS/J APIs. One JSR reported a 70 per cent reduction in specification effort through the use of the Tigerstripe tools.
A third impact has been on creating user-focused standards, as opposed to purely technical specifications. OSS/J and the JCP have high standards for defining interfaces. In addition to the interface specification, there must also be a use case or ‘Reference Implementation’ (RI) and a testing framework or ‘Technology Compatibility Kit’ (TCK). This allows an uninitiated integrator to see how the interface was intended to be used in a real-world scenario, and to test the compatibility of his or her application with the open standard. The TM Forum now requires that these useful tools to be delivered with all of their interface standards.
OSS/J helped the TM Forum craft the PROSSPERO™ programme, which certifies open standards as being ready for market adoption. PROSSPERO-ready interfaces package everything that an implementer needs for OSS or BSS interoperability including: interface specifications, testing frameworks, guidebooks, online developer support; access to reference implementations, plus educational, marketing, and developers’ tools. PROSSPERO interfaces must meet criteria of market adoption and having documented use cases. The idea behind PROSSPERO is to make it even easier for telecommunications companies to adopt open standard interfaces by setting high criteria for market readiness.
Now that OSS/J is well entrenched within the TM Forum, the organisation has shifted into high gear. Most of the OSS/J APIs will be upgraded and delivered as a ‘Summer Release’ in August 2007. The APIs that are planned to be released then are:
• Common API (which underpins all OSS/J APIs)
• Fault Management API
• Order Management API
• Trouble Ticket API
• Inventory API
New APIs that are slated to be released before the end of 2007 are:
• Pricing API
• Discovery API
Meanwhile, OSS/J has an open call to fellow members of the TM Forum to contribute resources and expertise to these and other specification efforts.
Going forward, more exciting news is likely from the OSS/J and TM Forum. One thread is the growing movement to harmonise all standards-making effort within TM Forum. At TeleManagement World held in Nice, France, on 20-24th May, 2007, the Harmony Catalyst demonstrated a unified approach to integration that incorporated OSS/J and MTOSI standards. This work demonstrated that OSS/J and MTOSI, two of the most popular standards from the TM Forum, are compatible with each other. The TM Forum Technical Committee is underscoring the need for a single standard, and a Harmony Architecture team is taking up the challenge to define the common guidelines for TM Forum standards. In addition, the TM Forum is reaching out to other standards bodies to use its PROSSPERO programme to promote other valuable standards in the market place.
The TM Forum has the right scope and clout to address the need for OSS integration standards. Never before has an organisation with a global perspective like the TM Forum – with reach into wireless, broadband, IP, billing and content – stood so firmly behind a unified standard for OSS integration. The focus that TM Forum is bringing to standardisation is unprecedented, and in combination with the rigor of OSS/J standards-making process, the impact is sure to be felt far and wide in the telecommunications industry. We may finally have the answer to the question by service providers, vendors and integrators alike: which OSS integration standard should we use? There’s a growing consensus behind a harmonised OSS interface standard from the TM Forum.
Information about OSS/J can be found at www.tmforum.org/ossj or by contacting Antonio Plutino at aplutino@tmforum.org
Doug Strombom is a Steering Committee Member of the TM Forum’s OSS/J Programme and CEO of Tigerstripe, Inc.
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