The TM Forum has selected the “Cloud Services Syndication, BSS/OSS for Service Syndication” entry as a finalist in the upcoming TM Forum Excellence Awards 2010 in the category of Solution Excellence.  The awards will be announced on May 18th in Nice, France.

As part of its “3 Screens and a Cloud" strategy, Microsoft implemented a set of operations systems to manage its new Online Services business (http://www.microsoft.com/online) during 2008.

Between March and October of 2008, Microsoft stood up an entire BSS/OSS stack composed of eight COTS packages and other custom components in time to support the commercial launch of Microsoft’s Business Online Services in October 2008.

The TMF Frameworx Integrated Business Architecture based BSS/OSS had to be designed to accommodate a variety of business models including direct to subscribers, indirect through partners, indirect through another service provider, and service syndication.

Microsoft was able to launch a commercial business supported by an entirely new BSS/OSS stack in only eight months. Microsoft, conservatively, reduced implementation time by 9-12 months by leveraging standards work around the Business Process Framework (eTOM), the Information Framework (SID), and the Application Framework (TAM).

Subsequently, the Microsoft BSS/OSS implementation has been able to scale to meet the requirements associated with deploying the Online Services offerings globally while maintaining the flexibility to support both subscription-based services along with usage-based cloud compute and storage services on the Azure platform.

The addition of the Microsoft Online Syndication Interface (MOSI) in 2009 was a very important step towards fully automating service syndication order processing. Derived from the TM Forum Solution Frameworks and Service Delivery Framework, MOSI provides the B2B interfaces for Service Ordering and Provisioning.

For service syndication partners, Microsoft drives additional revenue by helping them create and offer service bundles typically consisting of telecom voice and data communications services plus productivity and collaboration services from Microsoft.

Key benefits to partners and their customers include:

Ability to Deliver the Latest Business Productivity Capabilities

• Access to the latest in business collaboration applications and workflow that can be bundled to provide unique, sustainable offers

Ease of Use

• Partner end users have a unified, simple experience to access all of the hosted services

Privacy & Rapid Disaster Recovery

• Global redundancy and failover are included with MS Online Service bundles

Greater Flexibility and Agility

• Quickly enhance or expand your IT capacity by adding new services without having to invest in the development of new skills or deploying new hardware and software

Business-class Security & Reliability

• Microsoft datacenters and services are protected by multiple layers of security and operational best practices
• Microsoft Online Services guarantee a service level agreement of 99.9% uptime

Additional information and case studies with partner impacts are located here:

https://www.quickstartonlineservices.com/Pages/Default.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/online/partner/solutions-showcase.mspx