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How SOA Can Help
As service providers look to innovate ever faster and bring to market new services that combine unique capabilities, such as location or presence, with next generation data services, a SOA-based approach can help in at least three different ways:
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More services, faster: Proper usage of SOA principles allows for the exposure of network capabilities (such as location or presence or the ability to make a phone call) and new services through standard interfaces such as Web services. This in turn allows providers to build composite services by leveraging a (large) repository of pre-existing services quickly and easily. Sophisticated and easy-to-use service assembly tools make it possible for mere mortal developers and business analysts to build new services
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Sophisticated and easy-to-use service assembly tools make it possible for mere mortal developers and business analysts to build new services without going through extensive, labor -intensive, multi-stage requirement phases. |
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through Web services interfaces, it is possible to define authorization policies that regulate who can consume the location information. Similarly, providers can enforce load-balancing or service level agreements through declarative policies that are defined (and enforced) separately from the underlying capability itself. This separation of the policies from the underlying capability allows providers to
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- without going through extensive, labor-intensive, multi-stage requirement phases. This allows a service provider to bring new services to market faster and respond quickly to service adoption in the marketplace – an ability that is invaluable in today’s fiercely competitive communications industry. Further, the reduction in service development time makes it possible for a service provider to address the long tail, where even if a service is relevant to only a fraction of the service provider customer base, it can still be profitable to provide such a service.
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Protecting the network: Interestingly, exposing network capabilities through standard interfaces (e.g., Web services) allows a network operator or service provider to make use of the full set of SOA capabilities for policy enforcement. For example, once the location information of a mobile subscriber has been exposed
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- adapt the usage of the service in response to customer usage or business requirements, without needing to re-implement the underlying service. Finally, policy enforcement at the service layer can make use of detailed subscriber profile information (usually not available at the network protocol layer) and provide a highly custom, personalized service experience to every user.
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Rapid monetization: Finally, SOA principles can dramatically reduce the time it takes from service development to service monetization by accelerating the process of operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) integration for service providers. Historically, OSS/BSS integration has been a painful, highly customized, fragmented integration nightmare. However, by leveraging industry standards such as BPEL, abstracting common capabilities (such as the
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