Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 8

	This Month's Issue:
	Serving Up Service Delivery

Service Delivery Platforms and
the Evolving Role of OSS

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Service Operationalization with SDP-Ready Provisioning Systems

As the lead service in the first wave of subscriber-centric IMS-based services, voice over IP (VoIP) requires new and sophisticated provisioning and activation capabilities, including:

end-user self-service
provisioning workflow definitions best practices
CPE management and configuration
updates for emergency services, number portability, and VoIP peering databases

The anticipated introduction of many new and innovative IMS services—which blend elements of voice, video, and data—brings with it an exponential increase in service delivery complexity and a corresponding need to extend existing OSS capabilities to manage this complexity.

For SDP vendors who want to help their customers operationalize these services and get them to market quickly, establishing productive partnerships with innovative provisioning vendors—who are in the process of enhancing their product offerings to manage these complexities—is essential.

Open, Standards-based Interfaces

To ensure simple and rapid integration with a Service Delivery Platform, a provisioning and activation system must support open, standards-based, interfaces and employ service-oriented architecture principles.

One desirable option for an SDP-ready provisioning platform is to expose an order management interface that fully complies with the Service Activation standard from the OSS through Java™ initiative (OSS/J). This interface allows third-party OSSs—and in particular Service Delivery Platforms—to pass create, modify, and cancel activation requests to the provisioning system.

A key advantage of using a standard interface such as OSS/J is that regardless of the service being provisioned, the SDP is aware of only a single ordering abstraction.

Market-Proven, Multi-vendor Provisioning Flows

In addition to the use of open standards, SDP-ready provisioning systems require out-of-the-box provisioning flows that encapsulate best practices for the delivery of a wide range of high-value IMS services.

Provisioning workflows for IMS services can be extremely complicated and can encompass literally thousands of individual activities. Because of their extensive experience with back-office processes and practices, the leading provisioning vendors are uniquely positioned to capture this valuable domain expertise based on actual service provider deployments.

One of the key strengths of the various SDP frameworks is their support for the rapid creation of innovative new SIP - and IMS -based services.

Provisioning flows for IMS services define the business rules and logic required to perform the complete range of activities needed to activate a service for a business or individual user, for example:

creating enterprises, sites, and end users
reserving network resources
managing user entitlements
activating users on application servers
managing transaction roll-backs

Because of the varied needs of individual providers, the provisioning component of any SDP solution must be as flexible as possible and lend itself to ready customization.

Similarly, a modular and repeatable methodology for implementing these customizations is needed so that providers can choose the approach that best suits their business model.

Finally, for the Service Delivery Platform to be able to maximize the value of these standard provisioning flows, the flows must be compatible with the appropriate business process modeling languages employed by the leading SDP vendors, such as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), etc.

Service Bundling and Blending

Service bundling is central to the successful rollout of IMS services. As a result, in an IMS service provisioning environment, there is a strong need for an application that can help providers take services from diverse sources—SDP vendors, IMS vendors, and third-party developers—and bundle or blend them in a way that enables providers to successfully take them to market.

Conclusion

A service provisioning and activation platform architected according to SOA principles, and making use of currently accepted standards such as the OSS through Java initiative (OSS/J), can complement the core strengths of Service Delivery Platforms by facilitating simplified and rapid integration, providing out-of-the-box workflow definitions for a variety of IMS services, and offering a critical bundling capability that speeds the process of service operationalization.

By adopting an SDP framework that features these key provisioning and activation capabilities, providers will streamline their back-office processes, reduce costs, and get new revenue-generating services to market quickly.

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