MORRISTOWN, NJ—TM Forum standards adopters such as the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and NATO 3 now have a focused Program under the TM Forum called the "Defense Interest Group." Co-chaired by MITRE and QinetiQ, the Group already boasts more than 30 member companies that participate, support or sell into the Defense Industry.

The Defense Interest Group will foster a collaborative approach to the development of Military Unique Features, which are best practices, standards and guidelines unique to the Defense Industry. The foundation for these standards is the TM Forum's Transformation Framework, which comprises documents, toolkits specifications, guidelines and test criteria for building a “lifecycle” approach to development of management systems. 

“The NGOSS framework standards are becoming a key enabler to the Network-Enabled Capability [NEC] benefits chain supporting the appropriate connectivity with the necessary quality of network to enable the ability to share information," contends Simon Baker, deputy director for analysis and research, UK Ministry of Defence. “With its broad industry backing, NGOSS and our work exploring policy-based management fully supports this NEC benefits chain by providing manageable interoperability solutions among disparate network systems in extremely short timeframes. It makes sense to create a community for sharing and collaboration," adds Baker.

Martin Creaner, President and CTO, TM Forum contends “Defense is another large-scale industry that has begun embracing and adopting TM Forum standards. By launching the Defense Interest Group, we’ve created a community of interest, focused on exploring new areas of standardization as well as enriching existing TM Forum standards for the Defense Industry.”

The Defense Interest Group will be hosting a meeting and workshop at TM Forum’s Management World in Orlando on Monday, November 16, 2008. The theme of the workshop will be "Policy-Based Enterprise Management." The following day, a defense track will be held within the Transformation Summit, which will be chaired by QinetiQ's Martin Huddleston, principal engineer and management systems technical leader.  Speakers for the defense track include Bill Meskill, NetOps Technical Director for Joint Task Force Global Network Operations (JTF-GNO/J65), Manuel Hermosilla, OSS Chief for Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), and Bob Titus, VP of Global Converged Solutions for NetCracker.  

About the TM Forum
With over 700 member companies in 75 countries, the TM Forum is the world’s leading trade consortium focused on enabling digital services. Serving the information, communications and entertainment industries, the Forum provides leadership, strategic guidance and practical solutions to improve the way that services are created, delivered and charged. Members include the majority of the world’s service providers, network operators, software suppliers, equipment suppliers and systems integrators.

The TM Forum currently facilitates over 80 technical projects and provides extensive training, conferencing and information services to its members. Through its initiatives to help providers move to low cost, high quality ‘lean’ processes, the Forum helps its members automate business processes and work seamlessly across various parts of the service delivery chain. The organization provides industry benchmarks, guidebooks, process and software frameworks and downloadable software standards. These give service providers the direction and specific roadmaps to achieve much greater business efficiency and operational flexibility.

For further information regarding the TM Forum and related programs such as the Prosspero Program and Management World conferences, please visit www.tmforum.org