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By
Wedge Greene and Trevor Hayes
“Asking for an SDP is like walking into Barnes and Nobles and asking for a library. An operator must identify what components of the SDP it requires, and whether those components should be owned or managed.” - Alan Quayle
Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) are being built by dozens of vendors, and dozens more are contributing bits and parts to various SDPs. Yet every SDP is different and mutually incompatible. Further, some SDPs support and leverage IMS while others do not. Into this mess, the TMF has stepped forward with a powerful vision called a Service Delivery Framework (SDF). SDF will aim at interoperability. SDPs allow the rapid creation of services. SDF is planed as a broad glue using SOA to link otherwise incompatible SDPs with other resources and enablers. SDP is used to build a service. SDF, as conceived, allows services to be mashed up: service calling service, calling service, each being delivered by smart network enablers. While neither SDP nor SDF is a BOSS application we believe this work could be a ray of hope for Web 2.0 beleaguered service providers – becoming the Network Operators Mashup.
How Things Get Done
Around August 2006, Keith Willetts, Chairman of the TeleManagement Forum (TMF), chartered a “Landscape Team” to look at the whole emerging Web 2.0, SDP, content, and media convergence environment. Of course, nothing happens without precursors; here it seems to have come from Keith Miller (MD Pendragon Consulting Ltd and then CEO of Appium) lobbying since the spring of 2005 for the TMF to embrace service creation, especially for media and content. Keith Miller and Grant Lenahan of Telcordia came to lead this Landscape Team that included representatives from BT, AT&T, Alcatel/Lucent, Oracle, IBM, Amdocs, Telstra, Sun, and Siemens. In the fall of 2006, they concluded that the IMS and Web 2.0 initiatives were well understood, but a “big hole” existed in the SDF area. Basically, no one was building a framework that would bring together proprietary Service Delivery Platforms (SDP), IMS components, and Web 2.0 services in a usable, interoperable structure - probably because no one had yet invented something like that (although the precursor ideas have roots in the origin of NGOSS). So the Service Delivery Framework (SDF) was conceived, or at least rediscovered, as the answer to a basic need: How in the heck were service providers going to cobble all this stuff together and deliver timely, customer embracing new services? This team had a vision that the TMF’s work in NGOSS for OSS/BSS could be merged together with content and media to deliver rapid development and deployment of new services.
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While neither SDP nor SDF is a BOSS application, we believe this work could be a ray of hope for Web 2.0 beleaguered service providers – becoming the Network Operators Mashup. |
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Of course, not everyone on the team supported this – but the service providers understood the need and the infrastructure vendors and new ecosystem entrants saw the opportunity. They plowed through the challenges and obstructions of some entrenched OSS/BSS vendors. We saw this before when NGOSS was first placed in front of the TMF, but NGOSS had a distinct advantage – it already had defined business drivers, external momentum, and a preliminary architecture. When the SDF was presented to the larger TMF Board and Board advisors during the Fall TMW of 2006, it was just a concept and cartoon architecture, but it nevertheless resonated as something very exciting and important. Most of the vendors were building Service Delivery Platforms, but this sketchy SDF architecture was something more. We expect that Microsoft’s presence was felt by the team even if it was not yet actively involved with their Connection Services Framework, an architecture which is clearly ancestral to the SDF. Still, in our opinion, this was the most important and most original activity taken up by the TMF since NGOSS. Like NGOSS, it would likely ride in with new vendor members. And it validated that NGOSS was maturing since it proposed using the experience and products of NGOSS to solve a critical problem in an area outside of Business and Operations Support Systems (BOSS).
The proposed scope of work was reviewed by the TMF Board and a program was chartered. Possibly, not all of the board actually realized the full extent of the proposed scope – a program that could become every bit as large as NGOSS, but they did pick up on the key drivers and the enthusiasm of the landscape team, and the work plan did focus specifically on the SDF and operations and management impacts to service providers. This is not to say that the TMF turned aside from Media Convergence
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