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The Open Communication Architecture Forum this week unveils its first major deliverable, a public draft of its Carrier Grade Open Environment framework, at a 1 p.m. Wednesday press conference.

OCAF, which was formally established under ITU-T's Parent Study Group 13 a year ago, was established to help bring commercial off-the-shelf IT technology into the telecom network realm for the purpose of lowering the cost of core systems by eliminating dependence on proprietary equipment.

OCAF's members include service providers Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, NTT and Telecom Italia; technology providers such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard and telecom equipment manufacturers including Avaya, Cisco, Lucent, Nortel and Siemens.

For telecom service providers to be able to use off-the-shelf IT systems, there must first be well-defined requirements and interfaces for those systems, said Doug Dreyer, OCAF chairman and director, business development, Cisco Alliance, for IBM Systems & Technology Group.

Working first from a map of common service provider applications, such as IP Multimedia Subsystems, OCAF created two separate working groups--one to create the framework and another to define the commercial off-the-shelf components required.

This week, the first public draft of the framework, the CGOE, will be presented and OCAF's leadership is hoping other service providers will become engaged in their efforts.

"We want to get this out into the public and invite others to join us and take it to the next level, get it fully embraced by the industry," said Bruce Anthony, chief technology officer, telecom servers, for IBM Systems & Technology Group.

"We wanted to establish a framework and some network boundaries. The starting place was the service providers and what they wanted to offer."

In order to create a framework and define specific components for specific service needs, OCAF was formally established under ITU-T's Parent Study Group 13 in May 2004 and included a membership that represented all three types of industry participants: service providers including Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, NTT and Telecom Italia; solution providers as listed above and technology providers such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Anthony said.