The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the TeleManagement Forum reached an agreement that will allow TM Forum standards to be published by ITU as ITU-T Recommendations. The TM Forum's work has long been complementary to that of ITU-T's Study Group 4. The partnership means that the ITU and the TM Forum can avoid duplication of work and get standards to market in a far more efficient manner. Houlin Zhao, Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (secretariat for ITU-T), said "a policy of cooperation with other standards development bodies contributes significantly to the process and will ultimately help to create a fairer market for businesses and consumers."http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2003/20.htmlhttp://www.tmforum.org/
- The TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) has developed a New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) framework for procuring and deploying operational and business support systems and software. The TM Forum has some 340 member organizations worldwide.
- In June 2003, the Distributed Management Task Force and the TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) announced efforts to converge their shared information and modeling approaches to help support telecommunications/enterprise management convergence. The TM Forum and DMTF have traditionally been major players in the telecommunications and enterprise industries, respectively. Each has developed its own shared/federated information models: DMTF's Common Information Model – CIM; TM Forum's New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) Shared Information and Data – SID. They are now collectively working on the potential for integration of these shared information models to also support the essential need for telecommunications / enterprise convergence.