TM Forum Community

Almost all the active TM Forum working teams met up for a week in Lisbon, it was our biggest ever European Action Week. NFV comes up in many places. The Core Frameworx team continue to evolve Frameworx to take account of the changes NFV will bring (in fact almost all their meetings were with other teams looking to capture the latest thinking). In the IoE project meetings, they continue to explore how the business models that can take advantage of the agility we are hoping to create will work in practice, a lot of the focus is on how the risk and revenue will be shared, so they are focusing on practical applications of technology like blockchain, and also how digital trust is going to work. But most of the material directly focused on NFV impacts is in the ZOOM project of course. There are several major areas:

• Firstly, the Hybrid Infrastructure Platform work is creating a blueprint for a complete management platform for a Hybrid Network, focusing on NFV today but with an eye on 5G as well.
• Another related area getting a lot of attention at the moment is VNF onboarding and lifecycle management.
• Then there are the operational aspects, working on a more complete vision for the Operation Centre of the Future and some specific practical guidance on Devops.
• There was a team focusing on driving forward our work on providing a common language and Framework for Orchestration.
• And finally, a lot of activity jointly on with the API teams to ensure we have the complete set of APIs needed to standardize the interfaces to NFV resource management.

As you can see it is pretty extensive list, we are really trying to cover the complete internal transformation.

So my question to everybody on this Forum is: Are we focused in the right areas? Looking at my summary above, reading the report and if you can, looking at the detailed project notes, are we working on the things the industry needs in the short term?

Barry

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Barry Graham
TM Forum
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I was asked how people can get involved in these work items.

If you look in the document you will see some yellow tables which contain links that will take you to the TM Forum collaboration environment for each project. You need to join the project first to be able to access these pages, but once you have done that you can see meeting notes, look at the work in progress as it is being developed, make comments and contributions even if you are not able to attend the regular calls.

If you have problems with the environment just reach out to any member of the TM Forum staff and we will be able to help you.

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Barry Graham
TM Forum
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Barry and all,

ZOOM is definitely working on the right areas and trying to solve some of the key problems in the management of virtualization.

As you note, on-boarding of virtualized functions is a major pain-point for service providers. There are several threads within ZOOM working on this right now. Further, the focused work on a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) for the Hybrid Infrastructure Platform (HIP) is a critical deliverable for R17.0. The ZOOM project could definitely use a few more experts on this (e.g., connection management, details of descriptors / specifications in support of an intent-based approach). 

Steve

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Stephen Fratini
Ericsson Inc.
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Hi Barry et al,

I found the action week to be very useful and the different teams in the Forum are definitely focused on the right areas. Highlights for me were: 

- Open API progress since last Year is very impressive, with great collaboration from a range of organisations. The hackathon was also a great success with a very high standard of entries.
- ZOOM maturity has improved. The on-boarding topic now has a good momentum and again a great collaboration from virtually every operator and from many vendors (driven through on-boarding catalyst). 
- There were some good sessions on very practical and important topics - e.g. GDPR and MEF/TM Forum collaboration.


Regards,

Lester

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Lester Thomas
Vodafone Group
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