The TM Forum is an industry association focused on transforming business processes, operations and systems for managing and monetizing on-line Information, Communications and Entertainment services. The Forum has more than 700 global members in over 75 countries from across the converging industries of telecom, cable, media and the Internet.
The Forum provides strategic leadership, business guidance, best practices, and pragmatic standards that empower companies to reduce costs, reduce time to market and improve service quality.
The Forum develops these solutions by bringing together the brightest technical minds from Vendors, Service Providers and Systems integrator who focus their skills on how best to automate the key end-to-end processes along with the underlying systems and software to enable seamless management across the service delivery chain.
The TM Forum continues to expand its scope and influence across the whole service digital service delivery chain. In the past year our membership has grown around 22% and has exceeded 700 companies in over 70 countries, the membership is expanding beyond the communications and cable sectors to embrace the whole value chain from content companies through to consumer electronics. But the Forum’s mission remains the same: to help service providers, of all types, become more efficient and effective by removing barriers creating, delivering and monetizing services.
The Forum continues to drive forward on over 80 technical projects and has focused around 5 major initiatives: these cover areas such as the need to ensure that our core service enabling frameworks fully reflect the growth of content and information services; the need to manage end-end across complex value chains; the need to help service providers manage major transformation programs; the need to help new industry sectors, such as content and advertising, get engaged with automated service delivery to transforming our own ways of developing industry agreements to reflect ever faster industry needs.
Major new initiatives, such as the digital media services based Content Encounter living eco-system of players working together to create the underlying enabling infrastructure for content and advertising based services, have been launched. Content Encounter joins a vibrant cable Industry focus and the Forum’s IPDR work has been incorporated into the Tru2way cable standard in the USA. The Forum’s billing work has been expanded into the Revenue and Customer Care program and a new program aimed at managing any user device in a common way has also been attracting significant interest.
Uptake of TM Forum work is reflected in our library of over 150 implementation case histories; the nearly 2000 new web registrations each month and the 16000 + web pages views every day; the 3500 downloads from the Forum document library per month; the Forum’s training program growing by over 25% delivering over of 3000 days of student training and our webinar program also grew by 25% to reach over 6000 people worldwide. Our Events Program continues to grow, with Management World Nice breaking all records this Spring and regional events taking place for the first time in Africa and Singapore as well as Beijing and Tokyo.
