By Greg Scullard, Technical Leader, Cloud Systems Management Technology Group 
In recent years, catalogs have had a major role in allowing product offer and service creation sourced from complex value chains.
At the Management World conference expo held between 13th and 16th May 2013 and organized by TM Forum, which is a global, non-profit industry association focused on enabling service providers by providing agility and innovation, we are presenting and demonstrating, as Cisco Systems, the “Catalog Management in Digital Services Mash-Ups” as part of a “Catalyst” project in collaboration with a partner.
The goal is to use multiple product and service catalogs to communicate, expose and mash-up existing building blocks into new and innovative services in an efficient and easily understood manner among the players; the multiple catalogs are a key enabler for delivering and operating digital services in this environment. This Catalyst offers an end-to-end mashed up product offering for e-Health remote patient monitoring. The information exchanged contains the product offerings and their management functions with each catalog playing a specific role within the value chain. All catalog components are made visible via the TM Forum Integration Program (TIP) generic interface, communicating Information Framework (SID) data between catalogs.
Use case
In our catalyst, an application developer for a health organization has an idea for a new application such as glucose monitoring, blood pressure, heart rate monitoring, breathing monitoring, to provide home health monitoring for patients that lets them capture and report monitored readings and store their info to permit review by a nurse practitioner. Although the developer has the ability to use his development environment and catalog for creating product offers, he does not have all the required components to produce the e-health application. Through the TIP Interface Assembly Pattern, the developer can use two source catalogs, to browse, select and get the suitable monitoring tools, devices, communication services for SMS and MMS alerts or messages and a cloud storage area to save the collected bio-parameters. Therefore, the project demonstrates how to publish, subscribe and query for service candidates and product offerings. Each request for information unambiguously describes both commercial and technical data.
Benefits
- Consistent interface for inter-catalog communications
- Allow non-Telco App Developer to consume catalog content from many
- Allow Operators to consume catalog content for many new offerings
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