Integration between individual elements of the IT systems that support the management and operation of digital service infrastructure has been an important area of standardization for communication service providers for many years. As the digital service marketplace has evolved, integration between companies has become increasingly important alongside internal IT system integration. For business success today enterprises need to be able to rapidly integrate new systems both internally and across partnerships.
What is the Integration Framework?
The Integration Framework provides a complete set of standards to integrate existing legacy end to end management applications as well as the platform services of tomorrow.
Traditionally the integration framework contains a set of standards that support the integration and interoperability between applications defined in the Applications Framework. These standards have been widely adopted and are in use in the telecoms industry today.
The industry is migrating towards platform architectures, where the support and management functions are provided by platform support services, rather than discrete applications. The trend in the world of IT and the “digital natives” has been to integrate using APIs based on REST. The Integration Framework has thus been expanded to include the suite of TM Forum REST APIs. This suite of APIs covers both the needs of integration between digital service providers, following the TM Forum Digital Services Reference Architecture and the internal interfaces need to create a complete end to end management system for hybrid virtual and physical infrastructure using an automated, catalog driven approach.
As well as the APIs the Framework contains other assets to support creation of a complete solution, such as Orchestration Reference architectures and implementation guides. Some examples of these assets are:
- Mapping of SID to APIs and API Maps
- API Data Model
- DSRA and API Mappings ie DSM API
- E2E Business API Guide and B2B
How is it used?
The Integration Framework, used in conjunction with the other frameworks and reference architectures, allows digital service providers to identify the key integration points in their architectures, and define them in terms of widely adopted industry standard APIs.
What are the benefits?
Adoption of the TM Forum Integration Framework has the following benefits:
- Complete consistent set of standards for both inter and intra service provider integration available off the shelf to use immediately removes investment needed to create proprietary standards.
- Ever increasing adoption across a range of verticals allows rapid integration with new partners
- Wide adoptions across software vendors enable rapid integration of multi vendor solutions and prevents vendor lock-in.
Get Started
Video: Watch Barry Graham, Director of the Agile Business & IT program, give a brief introduction to the Integration Framework
TM Forum has developed an API ecosystem that enables services to be managed end-to-end and throughout their lifecycle in an environment where multiple partners are involved in the service delivery.
Download: browse and download the latest files from our collaborative projects related to the Integration Framework
Frameworx Architecture and Governance guides provide direction on how operational processes can be automated by using standardized information definitions from the Information Framework to define standardized, reusable SOA-based business services.
Training & Certification
Establish your Frameworx foundation: the go-to standard for reducing cost, risk and time-to-market. This course is an essential first step in your training journey, providing the grounding you will need to go deeper into studying any of the frameworks or other training topics on offer.
Get Involved
The TM Forum Integration Program (TIP) creates interfaces that are part of based on the Integration Framework. The ultimate goal of TIP is to develop well supported interface specifications, Reference Implementations (RI) and Compliance Test Kits (CTK) to fulfil the needs of the member companies.
The Frameworx Architecture Community is set up to ensure technical consistency across all aspects of the Frameworx and to facilitate harmonization of the various TM Forum work activities. This work is designed to strengthen the consistency of TM Forum deliverables and to assist in reduction of the cost of deployment by members. It operates under the governance of the Product and Architecture Governance Working Group (PAGWG) and the Technical Strategy Sub-Committee (TSS).
