IMS, SIP and Service Delivery Platforms: Telecom Adoption of SOA and Enterprise Applications

May 27, 2008 - PRLog -- This study focuses on Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs), next-gen platforms that are expected to become lynchpins in a new service delivery orientation being adopted by progressive carriers worldwide. These platforms, which leverage common off-the-shelf technologies (COTS), make it possible to reuse individual service components and separate the creation and execution of new service applications from the underlying network. Vendors such as Accenture, HP, Siemens, and Personeta are carefully aligning their solutions to support emerging standards such as IMS and SIP, thereby giving carriers the ability to innovate while continuing to deliver the improvements in their existing revenue-generating service mix.

Insight expects that the service providers will invest over $20 billion in SDP hardware and SDP-based applications to deploy new revenue-generating services. Over the longer term, service providers can leverage SDPs to evolve their infrastructures to an on-demand services environment. These platforms represent and important stage in network evolution. To keep abreast, read this report.

Report Excerpt

1.1 The Case for Service Delivery Platforms

Transforming the carrier’s legacy networks into an “on demand” converged business services environment requires building a dynamic infrastructure based on tightly integrated, streamlined critical business processes. These processes have to be efficiently linked within a company, with key business partners, as well as with subscribers. The challenge in the current carrier environment is overcoming the integration requirements of the highly complex, multiprotocol-oriented legacy business systems that, having evolved over the years, still drive revenue within the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

Creating “on-demand” in a large complex network infrastructure requires the interplay and collaboration between many organizational functions, responsible departments, and technologies. It is within this context that service delivery platforms (SDPs) address the opportunities and challenges in the current carrier environment. SDPs address not only the technology component of the equation, but also the methodology and governance models by which the technologies and tools will be applied to increase the probability of success.

An SDP, as defined by INSIGHT Research, is a next generation services platform for telecommunications service providers supporting emerging standards such as Internet protocol multimedia subsystem (IMS) and session initiation protocol (SIP) while at the same time inter-working with the legacy world as well. The SDP utilizes common off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies provided by traditional hardware suppliers such as IBM, Intel, HP, or Sun while meeting telco-grade requirement such as 99.999 percent availability of service and a well-defined disaster recovery solution. Functionally, the SDP helps service providers adopt a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in the telecommunications network environment through reusing individual service components and separating the creation and execution of new service applications from the underlying network.

The SPD acts as a bridge between the legacy world and emerging IP standards. For example, imagine an interactive gaming service that employs a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP)-based game application combined with SIP-based functions for presence, in addition to PSTN push-to-talk (PTT) and voicemail functionality for voice communications among the real-time gamers. What happens if one application component in the service goes down? How is failover managed for the entire service? For most telecommunications service providers today, it would not be possible to respond in an automated, consistent way to such a failure because of the lack of integration between the legacy, HTTP, and SIP environments. The result is an inconsistent quality of service (QoS) to the subscriber.

The SDP is mandatory if the carrier expects to deliver a high-performance execution environment for converged services in a multi-protocol, multi-vendor environment. The SDP is the glue that provides an on-demand environment for services that make use of Web services and SIP, as well as legacy capabilities. It enables a service provider to deliver a high QoS by leveraging features such as seamless failover handling, security, edge routing, and load balancing to create a converged services environment. By combining a common execution platform with a componentized approach to core service enablers, service providers can extend the functionality of, for example, presence or group list management across many different services. In this sense, the presence component of the interactive gaming example we cited earlier could be leveraged in an enterprise service to inform employees about the availability of colleagues and the best ways to contact them, such as using instant messaging (IM) via a mobile phone.

1.2 SOAs and SDPs

By definition, an on-demand converged services infrastructure must provide a level of integration and federation that spans heterogeneous, distributed computing environments. By their very nature, these environments consist of various platform architectures, programming languages, network access protocols, and implementation technologies.

The concept of SOA provides the logical glue to tie all of these disparate information technology (IT) resources together to make on-demand a reality. A SOA views every application or resource as a “service-task” that implements a specific, identifiable set of business functions. Service tasks communicate with each other by exchanging structured information—i.e., messages, which are sometimes called business objects. Once the application is identified, the next step is to define the high-level logical components (a.k.a. service enablers) that make up the service solution and how these components interact. This is known also as the application pattern. An application pattern may have logical components that describe a presentation tier developed by the service logic execution environment (SLEE) for interacting with service subscribers and the back-office/operations support system (OSS) functions. Application patterns break the application down into the most basic conceptual service element components, identifying the goal of the application. Through the SOA, the goal is to build an application that allows service subscribers to access their account information residing on various OSSes and business support systems (BSSes).

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