As carriers build out IP networks and grapple with how to evolve OSS to keep up with advancements in IMS and SDP, some form of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is needed.
In that vein, France Telecom’s chief architect drove the creation of the NGN OSS Blueprint Catalyst Project to harmonize NGOSS contracts with 3GPP IRP (integration reference points) and 3GPP’s TISPAN work from ETSI.
The project is currently in its third phase, which will involve a working OSS solution framework using ETSI, 3GPP and TMF standards.
The goal of the project is to clearly define how to use NGOSS contracts to devise service offerings, and to learn how SOA and standards-based OSS solutions can bridge the gap between service creation, product management and service fulfillment for IMS and other converged services infrastructure.
Working on those pieces is a team comprising companies representing all the necessary components, such as Netcracker, BEA, Progress Software/Pantero, Ceon and Cognizant, as well as France Telecom. All are working on a “blueprint” that runs the gamut from service creation to product catalog representation, ordering, fulfillment, and subscriber parameter management and usage.
The prototype OSS solution was built to support a weather alert notification service for residential customers.
“With this project, we were able to do a lot of integration on paper ahead of time,” says John Petrie, VP of business development for Progress Systems (formerly Pantero).
“Companies like France Telecom are preparing to introduce lots and lots of services, which will lead to hundreds or thousands of feature sets that ultimately will be activated or deactivated by end-users,” says Sanjay Mawada, Netcracker’s VP of strategy, which acted as the SI in the Blueprint project. “This project is meant to set the stage for the future, where invoking services, bundles and features using reusable infrastructure will be critical. SOA, in its design and concept, is the enabler for provisioning those features in a quick and scalable fashion.”
He and others in the Blueprint project consider contracts to be the key to SOA. “We all wanted to address criticisms that a gap existed between business analysis and systems analysis,” notes John Wilmes, CTO of Ceon. “When it came time to implement contracts, every service provider and systems integrator had to be on its own, because no definitions of what the contracts should look like existed.”
The project complements work from TMF’s NGOSS contracts working group, spearheaded by BT and AT&T. It is supposed to represent the first time detailed NGOSS contracts for service interfaces will be used. “That working group has a real sense of urgency right now, and it has a lot of internal sponsorship as contracts come to the forefront for forging and tracing relationships in the business, systems, implementation and deployment levels of SOA,” says BEA’s Doug Tait, director of global marketing for telecom.
With Blueprint, a template has been created through documents describing the content and semantics of implementation contracts that are specific to technology, as well as to systems and types of business.
“All of the software vendors in this project used SID-based interfaces, except where deliberate translations were needed. That fact has lead to interface contracts and NGOSS implementations contracts that are reusable,” says Ceon’s Wilmes. He says the implementation contracts describing reusable fulfillment scenarios can be used by others.
One of the main reasons “reuse” is expected is that this catalyst project is the first where all software components communicate using Web Services, thus making it a true SOA. It is thought to represent SOA because all of the participating applications have been connected through an SOA management bus (in this case, BEA’s AquaLogic).
“That means there is no direct communication or hard-wiring among applications,” says Sajith Sankar, engagement manager at Cognizant Technology Solutions. “All of the participating applications were connected through the SOA management bus rather than hard-wiring with Web Services, which does not equate to SOA.”
By embedding DataXtend Semantic Integrator (DataXtend SI) into the AquaLogic management bus, real-time semantic integration enabled the companies to map interfaces in a matter of 10 weeks. (It is expected that full-scale transformations would have delivery times proportionate to the scope of those projects.)
“Loose coupling of the applications across the service bus allowed for rapid integration, because no hard-wiring between the applications sitting on the boxes was necessary,” says BEA’s Tait. “That will expedite upgrades and modifications as well.”
It remains to be seen whether the full-blown demonstration system that results from this catalyst project could serve as a model for some of the large-scale transformations underway in telecom. It’s possible commercial prototypes will roll out in service provider labs in upcoming months.
If prototyped, the work from the project could be implemented in SOA frameworks that include XML/SOAP, WSDL and UDDI standards and technologies.
If it delivers on its promise, the Blueprint template could help France Telecom and others open the door to integrating the network and IT domains. That could enable a service delivery OSS that carriers would use to deliver converged services faster.
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