Symbiotic Relationship between TM Forum and IFPUG Augurs Well for IT Industry

TM Forum is an industry and executive-driven organization, which brings “real world” issues and focuses of today to the forefront of discussions. The International Function Point Users Group, IFPUG, announced that it has established a formal relationship of cooperation and collaboration with TM Forum (News - Alert).

TM Forum has more than 700 corporate members in 195 countries. While it primarily focuses on enabling best-in-class IT for service providers in the media and communications market, and the cloud service market, the IFPUG, a nonprofit, member governed organization, is concerned with the promoting and encouraging of innovation and application of IT measurement techniques.The overlap in member companies coupled with the new relationship between IFPUG and TM Forum, and the presence of identical model boundaries, data and processes, will enable industry to have enhanced analytical frameworks and improved efficiency.

While TM Forum frameworks can be applied to help consistently identify application boundaries and document high level processes to provide guidance regarding the application or product, IFPUG helps to populate some of the TM forum frameworks and low level processes.

Involved in the Mobile World Congress (News - Alert), 4G and other advanced telecommunication communities, TM Forum has the ear of industry and is directed, based upon industry priorities of today. As it also hosts the reuse and standards communities for various tools and facilities NGOSS, OSS/J, MTOSI and other application developer frameworks, IFPUG is able to complement TM's initiatives by providing clarity in the area of IT performance measurement. 

In the month of September 2010, from 13 – 15, the IFPUG will conduct the International Software 'Measurement and Analysis Conference' at São Paulo, Brazil, and the TM Forum will conduct the 'Management World Americas' at Orlando, Florida from November 9-11, 2010. 

In a related news release, the NGMN Alliance (News - Alert) and the TM Forum announced that they have signed a co-operation agreement to work together on optimized management systems and operations of the next generation of mobile networks.

Another news related item is that the International Function Point Users Group announced that it has released the latest version of the IFPUG Counting Practices Manual. The CPM is the body of knowledge used by function point analysts to measure the functional size of applications and projects for benchmarking and estimating world-wide for many domains and business areas