A New Layer: The Facilitation Layer
A new layer is emerging in technology. It is a layer above IP, above applications, above conventional signaling layers. It is driven by change. Users want technology, applications, software, and hardware that are more adaptable to their business needs and their ability to serve their customers. Vendors want the flexibility to be faster to respond to these customer requirements.

Emerging Demands: TrueBaseline Solutions
In next-generation carrier networks, carriers are converging on a single infrastructure that can meet these emerging demands by users and more flexibly provision all services on a single technology. IP has emerged as that technology focal point. Carriers are migrating legacy services—voice, wireless, and multimedia—to new, robust IP backbones driven by powerful signaling and interworking technologies such as MPLS, IMS, FMC, and so on. Simultaneously, they are endeavoring to move these evolving networks to more profitable business models, which can justify the massive expenditures in new infrastructure. Evolving efforts by consortiums such as IPsphere, IETF, ITU-NGN, and TISPAN are defining new structuring/control layers that will manage this convergence and collaboration.

In Enterprise networks, this new layer is being driven by the migration to web-based software services or SOA networks. The impact of SOA on these networks changes everything—the way applications are constructed and implemented, the way IT infrastructures and networks are constructed and managed, and the way business is done. While this new model adds unprecedented agility and responsiveness to customer needs, it annuls every management, compliance, and governance model to date, leaving users scrambling for ways to bring disparate platforms, tools, and infrastructures together in a cohesive manner, much less meet increasing demands for compliance.

The result is massive, chaotic change.

It’s change at a time in which users and vendors have survived the technology bubble burst by focusing—picking their spots in the market carefully and developing products, services, and customers with care.

Those days are gone. Industry indicators are moving up, and large buyers are changing from a heads-down, tactical approach to their technology needs to a far-sighted and strategic view. Sales engagements and product lines must reflect this new buyer mindset. The breadth of buyer goals is increasing as the planning horizon expands, but most companies simply cannot address this kind of moving target with their own development. They need to focus on their core value, and so they need a partner who can integrate that core value most effectively into the business needs of their customers.

TrueBaseline intends to be that partner to vendors of high-value platforms in the Enterprise and Service Provider space.