12-15. April 1999, Turtle Bay Resort, Oahu, Hawaii

The TINA Consortium (TINA-C) of 46 carriers, suppliers and technology companies meets in Hawaii this month to present the telecom industry with a modern, forward-looking software architecture to address ever-increasing customer demand for innovative new services.

The TINA Conference '99 will hear feedback from major carriers such as Sprint Corp., NTT Corp., Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom about real TINA deployments in their networks. Specialist manufacturers such as Expersoft, Iona, and Starvision are expected to present their latest TINA-compliant products, and carriers will present tough new requirements for the real-time control and management that only TINA can deliver.

"We believe TINA concepts and principles are mainstream now. We're beginning to see some real products built to these specifications," said Deb Guha, Chief Executive Officer, TINA-C.

After an initial day of tutorial and workshop sessions, TINA '99 kicks off with panel discussions and technical paper presentations from Alcatel, BT Labs, CSELT, Hewlett-Packard, Korea Telecom, Lucent Technologies and many others. Subjects explored include the TINA Service Architecture; the integration of TINA with legacy Intelligent Networks, agents for Advanced Telecom Services, and distributed billing environments.

The conference will hear keynote speeches from Stagg Newman, chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission, and Thomas Rowbotham of BT Labs. The concluding day and a half is set aside for a meeting of TINA-C members who will hear reports from consortium Working Groups, discuss the latest research and demonstrate products based on the TINA architecture.

"In the current telecom industry environment of rapid mergers and equally rapid dissolution of alliances, TINA results are particularly useful in helping cushion technology differences," said Hendrik Berndt, Chief Technology Officer, TINA-C.

 "We need to deploy ubiquitous services level over POTS, mobiles, and multimedia/voice over packet: the best approach is to port intelligence from legacy networks to new networks through common call servers and common Intelligent networks. TINA provides tools to make this decoupling of control and transport ", says Martine Lapierre, TINA-C President and Alcatel Switching and Routing Division Vice-President.

Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom will present the conference with results of their joint project, SATIN (Software Architecture using TINA for IN). The two carriers recently completed the design and implementation of a service platform reaching across both their networks, integrating TINA concepts with their existing Intelligent Network architectures.

NTT will also report on its work over the past three years on integrating the TINA architecture into its network technologies in Japan.

US operator Sprint recently announced it will reengineer its combined voice, data and video network, ION (Integrated On-demand Network), incorporating TINA architecture and specifications. Representatives from Sprint will describe a TINA-compliant provisioning system based on ATM, and explain how standardization will help them better manage multivendor relationships.

"The biggest single issue for the TINA Consortium has been 'when will it be real?' Sprint's ION announcement and projects like SATIN indicate that the time is now," said Joe Sventek, General Chair of the Conference and Hewlett-Packard's TINA-C Technical Forum member. "The industry has realized for some time that more complex services require a more sophisticated control plane than that provided by the Intelligent Network. TINA provides a conceptually clean platform and appears to be ready for primetime."

History
Since its formation in 1993, TINA-C has developed sophisticated software specifications addressing the urgent need to migrate networks from the 'switch-centric' model to a Distributed Processing Environment (DPE). In the TINA model, intelligence is sited increasingly at the edge of the telecom network. The TINA DPE concept builds on the computer industry's research into distributed processing, applying it to a range of network devices and user terminals. Ultimately, in the TINA model, even the humble cellphone becomes an intelligent network device.

Now TINA-C is ready to promote its work aggressively by bringing TINA products to the attention of the wider industry. By year-end 2000, the Consortium aims to ensure the availability of large-scale deployments of TINA-compliant products and TINA-based services.

The need for TINA
In a world already replete with a multitude of services, the addition of even more sophisticated end products can be a nightmare for those who create, deploy and manage the service - compounded by a tradition of legacy, multiple-vendor architecture.  

In the face of the current rapid changes, there are several questions to be answered: How can the industry harness the new technical opportunity? How can it provide versatile multimedia services over the Internet and traditional telecom networks? How can it keep in check the cost of creating, deploying and managing these services? And, how can it incorporate flexibility in the service software for current and future network technologies?

Many believe that a new approach is needed, but one which can also interwork with existing systems and standards. The answer is to define a new software architecture that capitalizes on the latest advances in computer and telecom technologies, to rationalize complex software for services and network management. The answer is TINA.

TINA technology
TINA is an object-oriented software architecture designed to separate high level applications from the underlying physical telecom infrastructure.

Control and management functions that are normally sited at the switch are migrated onto servers, using a unified TINA architecture based on a distributed processing environment (DPE). This allows control and management features to be deployed flexibly within the network, instead of being forced to reside on a particular system at particular geographical locations. The TINA DPE can be based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture developed by the Object Management Group (OMG), which is a member of TINA-C, and also runs over JAVA or DCOM at the terminal side. By migrating intelligence from the core network to user terminals, TINA combines the distributed character of the Internet with the inherent reliability, quality of service and security of telecom networks. When integrated, these two technologies offer an unprecedented opportunity to enable versatile multimedia and information services and to innovate the way these services are created and provided.

A number of Reference Points are defined within TINA. These provide for clear separation between the roles of each player in the industry (for instance between retailer and consumer), enabling new entrants and established companies to expand their businesses with maximum flexibility.

About TINA-C
The TINA Consortium (TINA-C) was formed in 1993 by 40 telecom carriers, suppliers and computer manufacturers as a co-operative body to define a common software architecture for telecommunications. Since then, and through interaction with industry bodies such as the Object Management Group, the ATM Forum, DAVIC, ITU-T and the TeleManagement Forum, TINA-C has assisted the telecom industry in improving the way services are designed.

At the end of 1997, TINA-C delivered its completed set of validated architectural specifications. At this point the consortium decided to restructure to drive forward the adoption of TINA in the marketplace, forming separate interest groups to address Intelligent Networks, Mobility, Service Management, Service Access and Provisioning, Electronic Commerce, Security, Application of TINA, the Distributed Processing Environment (DPE), IP control and Management, and Compliance and Testing.

The 46 TINA-C members include: Alcatel, AT&T, BT, Cable and Wireless, Cegetel, China Ministry of Information Industry, CSELT, Deutsche Telecom, Eurescom, Expersoft, France Telecom, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Iona, Korea Telecom, KPN, Lucent Technologies, Marconi Communications, MCIWorldcom, NEC, Nortel Networks, NTT, OKI, OMG, Sharp, Siemens, Sprint, Starvision, Sun Microsystems, Swisscom, Tadiran, Telcordia (Bellcore), TeleDanmark, Telenor, Telia, Telkom, Telstra, Toshiba.

For more information about the consortium see www.tinac.com. For more information on TINA principles see, http://www.tinac.com/about/principles_of_tinac.htm