.gif)
SOA - Keeping it alltogether
Financial and reputational risk management might be a relatively new discipline for service providers but, if they choose the approaches to service oriented architectures now on offer from some IT vendors, their supporting IT systems will be unable to cope with the increasingly dynamic, real-time complexities of the new telecommunications switching environment, claims John Hart
For all it’s done over the last century or so to bring together people and businesses, the telecommunications industry has remained curiously fragmented behind the scenes. Semi-proprietary standards, internal empire-building, regulatory uncertainty and near-constant technological change have all contributed to the now legendary silo architectures and processes that increasingly impact on the competitive efficiency of service providers.
Sure, from CORBA onwards we’ve had our share of unifying visions. Indeed, some like the TeleManagement Forum’s NGOSS initiatives are now being used in commercial anger by both service providers and vendors alike to cut the painful overheads involved in integration. More recently, we’ve also had Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) emerge as a new discipline. It’s already brought major benefits to other industry sectors and, in turn, now promises to help service providers cope with the enormous transformational challenges that our industry confronts.
SOA – which flavour?
The founding concepts behind SOA certainly seem ideally suited to the current pressures on the telecommunications industry. The network is no longer a closed monopoly entity and customer value is increasingly coming from delivering openness and interactivity with an ever-growing range of services, applications and third party content. On top of this, service providers must move as quickly as possible to separate their business logic and processes from the underlying IT systems – where they’ve remained trapped and isolated for so long, incurring huge extra systems integration costs to achieve even the most basic types of ‘joined-up’ services.
With IMS rapidly coming over the horizon as the Holy Grail platform for converged services, Service Delivery Platform issues are also helping to drive this focus on SOA as a potentially powerful solution. Services are no longer linear in nature, but instead rely on the combination and re-use of multiple components and network and application elements. If, according to the marketing hype of the 1990s, Intelligent Networks were going to be the ‘glue’ that held together the world of future advanced applications, then protocols like SIP behave far more like Velcro and that near-infinite and much anticipated flexibility must be supported in appropriate ways.
Squaring the circle
For far too long, service provider CEOs have been trying to square the circle of increasing market share and revenues while simultaneously lowering costs. According to recent research, around 55 percent of executives have stated that their competitive advantage is going to come specifically from new business models – rather than particular products and services.
If that’s the future direction of the sector – and SOA is going to provide the underlying framework and enabler for those business models – how should a service provider go about implementing their SOA and service introduction strategy to get the maximum long term benefits?
One approach lies in focusing on the penultimate two words of that last sentence – ‘long term benefits’. Some of the companies out there such as BEA, IBM and Oracle offer SOA solutions that take a piece-by-piece approach to solving a service provider’s legacy issues. As a result, these seem at first to be highly price competitive when it comes to dealing with just a single application or intentionally limited pilot project.
This commercial strategy – which is certainly good for the vendor’s long term bottom line – isn’t necessarily so good for the service provider. While ‘Trojan Horse’ marketing disciplines might attract shareholders, the ever-increasing complexity of the telecommunications applications and services world leaves it vulnerable and locked in over the longer term to one particular vendor’s framework.
For those with long memories of this industry, there’s certainly a strong sense of déjà vu about the recurrence of these issues. Ever since the early days of IN, traditional IT vendors have long had their eyes on the potentially rich pickings in the telecommunications marketplace – only to frequently stumble when it came to fulfilling the very different operational and technological requirements of that sector.
For the telecommunications engineer, delivering reliability and scalability and real-time performance are an inherent part of their professional working ethos. The traditional public service face of telecommunications created networks and services of incredibly high reliability that far exceeded anything found within the enterprise space – even in the financial services sector. As a result, in most developed countries, the telephone became an effectively invisible adjunct to society, as ubiquitous and taken for granted as the air that we breathe.
Now, just at the moment when the signalling and services environments are undergoing a major step change in increasing complexity to support new multimedia, content and applications – working seamlessly across highly distributed resources and servers – we see some IT vendors attempting to sell what are still essentially enterprise solutions into carrier-class settings.
Who are you going to bet on?
The key problem is that their approaches betray the very different traditions and values of the IT and telecommunications communities. While the enterprise IT world has its own particular criteria for performance, these are focused around the availability of applications over a usually closed and stable network. In stark contrast, the telecoms engineer is trained from day one to deal with the implicit complexity of multiple architectures and processes that can reach to the farthest parts of the planet – and that is also expected by its users to react within milliseconds to commands and changes.
This holistic but hard-headed engineering perspective – and its complementary sensitivity to the end user’s expectations – is one of the most valuable assets of the telecommunications community. Traditional telecommunications switching might now be moving from the effectively flat-plane days of SS7 and IN to a richly multi-dimensional framework of constantly shifting assets, services, partnerships and technologies, but those older disciplines of real time performance, reliability and scalability must also be carried forward. The alternative is to leave our customers – the general public in nations around the world – to become increasingly disillusioned with the much-hyped world of the new telecommunications.
It’s therefore vital that we don’t see a repeat of the problems that afflicted the Intelligent Networks area a decade or so ago. For that to happen, we’ve got to understand how the different SOA architectures currently being proposed best complement the emerging realities of the IP switching environment.
John R. Hart is Vice President, Ubiquity Software Corporation and can be contacted via:
jhart@ubiquitysoftware.com
Share this article with others
Post to del.icio.us
Printed from http://www.eurocomms.com/features/111365/SOA_-_Keeping_it_alltogether.html
Comment on this article
Skip to comments
We encourage users to analyse, comment on and even challenge European Communications's articles, including the one above - 'SOA - Keeping it alltogether'
User reviews and comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site.
Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. We will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site.