Dinard Plenary Meeting Wrap-Up

Well November and 4^th quarter of 2007 is upon us already, the northern hemisphere has just dropped daylight savings time while those of us in the southern hemisphere “spring forward”. The IPSF heads into the last 2 months of the year off a very progressive plenary hosted in Dinard, France by France Telecom/Orange. Our gratitude to Marc Fossier (FT CTO) and his team Philippe Lucas, Christian Jacquenet and Nadine Lancelot for their exceptional hospitality and facilitating skills. So, what happened at IPSF Dinard and what are next steps heading into our Q4 workshop in London?

The really big news from Dinard is the commitment of at least 5 of the world’s tier 1 network operators to joint field trials in early 2008.  (See corresponding press release for more details.) This field trial will enable operators to trial various multi-stakeholder use cases across their networks in a pre-commercial validation of the IPsphere framework enablement of richer online experiences. Expect to hear more from us on this – we’re thinking of calling it “NGNsphere” and would certainly welcome your thoughts on a name  - later in ’07 and early ’08.

Speaking of IMS and NGNs, our specification for inter-working of IPsphere with IMS and related NGN frameworks was taken closer to its final ballot at Dinard. This effort is being worked under the title “Session Services Resource Management” and will – all being well – be released into the public domain very early in 2008. This is a very important, and quite detailed, body of work and its editor – Peter Busschbach of Alcatel-Lucent – was awarded the IPsphere Circle of Excellence award at Dinard in recognition of his exceptional commitment to advancing this activity. Congratulations and thank you once again Peter!!

On the specification front, a large number of quite detailed contributions to our next IPsphere release specification were presented and reviewed in Dinard. The plenary meeting prioritized several of these for inclusion in straw ballot text for next specification and this work is underway now for further acceleration in the November London workshop. I’ll just cite the topics of these contributions here and attempt to explore them in further detail in subsequent Stratosphere postings; Fault Management, Fractal Decomposition of Services/Elements, Data Model and Template Structuring, Publication & Repositories, Adjacencies & Bindings, In-Service Modification of a Service, Functional Elements, IPsphere Glossary updates, TM Forum harmonization.

The IPSF has a variety if liaisons and collaborations with related industry efforts underway, one of these is with the GSM Association where the IPsphere framework and the GSM-A IPX initiative offer quite complementary capabilities to one another. The Dinard plenary agreed to kick off an activity group that will work up an IPX use case to demonstrate how the IPsphere framework might be leveraged to facilitate the establishment and federation of IPX exchanges. This AG will get underway at the London workshop in November.

IPSF Dinard was themed “Content & IPsphere” and, in addition to the work outlined above, several contributions outlined how Web and other content service providers could leverage the IPsphere framework in ways that didn’t require them to modify their current practices majorly. Under the banner of “vertical partnerships” the advancing of these contributions was recognized as being key to enabling network operators and so called “over-the-top” service providers to readily and easily collaborate to rapidly and creatively innovate to offer online experiences that are just not (either or both technically or economically) feasible today. More on this in subsequent postings too. 

At Dinard we also nailed down the IPSF plenary meeting schedule for 2008: In January we will come together in Shenzhen, China thanks to our hosts at Huawei. In July we will meet in Dublin in conjunction with the MultiService Forum, and in late Q3/early Q4 2008 we will meet in Canada. There is more information available on the IPsphere Forum web site, and its constantly being updated so do come back and visit regularly.

There you have it, my quick yet thorough update post-Dinard. More from me again in a few days – in the meantime do drop us your thoughts, they are always welcomed and appreciated; just email us at info@ipsphereforum.org

Cheers, Kevin Dillon
IPsphere Forum Chairman

Technorati Tags: NGN, ContentSphere, IMS, Service Provider Agreement, Session Services Resource Management