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By
Indu Kodukula
Introduction
Today, service providers are undergoing wrenching change. The widespread adoption of IP and the Internet, and the resulting commoditization of voice revenues – the traditional mainstay of service providers’ business – are turning traditional business models upside down. At the same time, the increasing availability of network-agnostic, over-the-top services from new-generation, Internet-only service providers demonstrates that innovation and revenue-generating services are far from dead. To the contrary, the current era will most likely be recognized as a time when communications became truly democratized, more personal and more ubiquitous than ever before.
Fortunately, the same approaches that have enabled new-generation service providers to succeed on the Web can also make it possible for traditional service providers to innovate rapidly and bring new services to market without sacrificing their traditional DNA around scale, mission-criticality, and service availability. Service oriented architecture (SOA)-based design of next-generation network capabilities provides a blueprint for such innovation, enabling providers to quickly and accurately deliver next-generation services and deliver a better, more personalized communications experience.
Evolution of SOA
The emergence of SOA concepts has been a major driver of enterprise architecture evolution over the last decade. SOA principles of loose coupling, separation of concerns (e.g., component logic from orchestration logic) and standards compliance have allowed enterprises to be more agile and adaptive to change brought by the Internet. By enabling component reuse and rapid service assembly, SOA has enabled enterprises to greatly improve IT productivity.
As SOA adoption has become mainstream, communications providers are increasingly looking to SOA-based approaches to next generation service delivery. Standards-based service delivery platforms (SDPs) built on Internet-technology standards – such as Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) – are leading the way. As its name suggests, the SDP is the horizontal platform that forms the basis for development, deployment, execution, and management of next-generation services in a telecommunications environment. In the context of a communications provider, the SOA design principles remain the same as in the enterprise environment with some subtle enhancements and variations. In particular:
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At the same time, the increasing availability of network-agnostic, over-the-top services from new-generation, Internet-only service providers demonstrates that innovation and revenue-generating services are far from dead. |
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- components such as Enablers – as defined by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) – that allow specific capabilities of the underlying network to be exposed using standard interfaces. Client applications can make use of these capabilities without being tightly coupled to a particular implementation or a particular underlying network protocol.
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Standards compliance: By developing network capabilities and other application components through standard interfaces, and by making use of standards such as Web services and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), it is possible to leverage development tools and methodologies that the Internet community has matured over the last decade. Ultimately, standards compliance leads to vendor independence, application portability, and lower costs.
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Separation of concerns: By separating concepts, such as policy enforcement or service composition, from the underlying service, it is possible to evolve a service behavior without having to rewrite a service. At the same time, service assembly as a separate task from service development becomes possible, opening up the world of service delivery to a much wider development talent pool.
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