PSA initiative?

Sponsored by some of telecommunications biggest names, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, TeliaSonera and QinetiQ, the Product and Service Assembly Initiative (PSA) is a collaboration of vendors and service providers who are looking to solve today’s largest operational problem: How to create an IT reference architecture which will:

- Streamline the NGN product/service lifecycle
- Bridge the service creation gap between OSS/BSS/Service Execution
- Reduce the cost of service/product production


The founding members of the ‘Product and Service Assembly’ (PSA) initiative today announced that Convergys, Microsoft, QinetiQ and TIBCO are to participate in the second phase of the Product and Service Assembly Initiative and associated TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) Catalyst.

The aim of the PSA initiative is to develop a reference IT architecture that enable new telecommunications services to be easily assembled from existing or new service elements and to dynamically orchestrate the required changes that result within the appropriate OSS/BSS applications.

QinetiQ, one of the world's leading defense technology and security companies joins BT, Cable & Wireless and TeliaSonera as sponsors of the initiative, while Microsoft, TIBCO and Convergys join existing vendor and systems integrator participants Atos Origin, Axiom Systems, Huawei and Oracle.

The approach is based around a set of co-operating product and service catalogs that are designed to allow product management, service and network engineering and operational communities to easily collaborate. TM Forum standards are leveraged to provide off-the-shelf integration of the OSS/BSS elements, dramatically reducing the time in which this type of architecture, utilizing multiple vendors’ products can be created and demonstrated.
Phase 1 of the PSA Initiative’s Catalyst demonstration, which served as the initial ‘proving ground’ for the Initiative, was successfully showcased at TeleManagement World (TMW) Dallas in December 2006, through a scenario that showed how a VoIP-based product can be conceived, designed, assembled and delivered within a matter of minutes.

The second phase of the PSA initiative expands the scenario to a consumer oriented Triple Play bundle of high value broadband media services that includes broadband Internet connectivity, basic voice services based on VoIP and IPTV services including Video on Demand. This will allow the development of production ready standards and the creation of an ecosystem of PSA compliant COTS.