Seen & Heard: TM Forum Seeks to Unite Open Source

Is it group hug time for open source? The TM Forum has offered to unite the various open source communities for the good of the telecom industry.

Carol Wilson, editor-at-large for Light Reading, spoke to the TM Forum's Barry Graham, senior director of agile business and IT, about his organization's proposal to unite multiple open source network management and orchestration efforts to create a hybrid network management platform. (See TM Forum Wants Role of Open Source Glue.)

The unifying effort is already underway. Last month, the TM Forum organized a meeting in Stockholm that included eight open source groups, such as ONOS, Open Daylight, Open Platform for NFV Project Inc and Open Source MANO Community (OSM), as well as service providers, including AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), Orange (NYSE: FTE), Telenor Group (Nasdaq: TELN) and China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL).

At that Stockholm meeting, Graham said that the various entities learned that there wasn't that much overlap between the open source communities, and that most of them were actually complementary, which was contrary to some of the opinions expressed during a panel at the OpenDaylight Summit in September. (See The Growing Pains of Open Source.)

Unifying the open source groups would take place under the auspices of the TM Forum's Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management (ZOOM) project.

Graham, according to Wilson, said the TM Forum is planning on creating a "Catalyst" project early next year, which would bring network operators and other interested parties together for real-world demonstrations. Catalysts are proof-of-concept projects developed collaboratively by TM Forum members.

"We have a tentative discussion going with these guys to try to build a Catalyst project around a hybrid network management platform incorporating all these open source guys," Graham said to Wilson. "TM Forum has expertise in this area -- we brought all the independent software vendors together, and isn't this just a similar world, now that we have open source contributing to that whole mosaic."

The TM Forum is also rallying around the flag with its Open API initiative, which includes operator and vendor input. (See Vodafone, Huawei, TM Forum Team Up on Open API Map.)

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation