SOUTHBOUND TO THE NETWORK

By definition, service delivery platforms aren't just about service creation — they're about managing and delivering applications as well. Some vendors have both service creation and service management capabilities on a single platform, but this also is the realm of vendor partnerships. Regardless of the approach, areas such as policy governance, application management, profile and identity control, security, and testing come to the forefront as carriers attempt to deliver hundreds if not thousands of full-blown services and individual service components via an SDP.

“Governance hasn't received much attention on the network side, but it's a big thing in the IT world,” said Peter Dragunas, director of network domain for Hewlett-Packard's communications, media and entertainment division. “You need a strong policy management system in place to manage third-party access, implement different [service level agreements] and enforce rules you put around different services.”

Managing access to service components also can be a service differentiator for carriers. “When you link application requirements to network infrastructure via policy, you automate many of the operational aspects of delivering services, including making changes in the network to guarantee appropriate delivery,” said Chris Komatas, director of service provider marketing for Juniper Networks. “Some applications are fine with best-effort delivery, but some need preferential treatment and assured delivery. The last thing a service provider wants to do is introduce a new service without the ability to guarantee user experience and end up with the high cost of managing complaints coming into the call center.”

Policy management and other southbound-facing SDP capabilities also must integrate closely with OSS/BSS systems to help carriers not only deliver but provision and bill for new services, said Dragunas. “It's not always the first thing that comes to mind at the beginning of a conversation about new services,” he said. “But once you explain it to a customer, they get it right away. If you don't have the right management infrastructure in place to support new services, things are going to get chaotic.”

“One of the attributes embedded in the SDP that you don't have in the IMS specs are explicit interfaces to BSS/OSS,” Greisinger said, adding that back-office integration accounts for up to 60% of the cost of delivering a new service, placing a stranglehold on new service delivery.

Ah, yes: IMS. While IMS is discussed at times as being almost synonymous with telco new service creation — and often with the slowness of new service creation, a reputation at times both deserved and a bit unfair — its main focus is the carrier's IP network, providing a framework for session-based call control, presence, identity, real-time billing and other capabilities that can be exposed to an SDP in the form of service enablers. There are points of overlap between SDPs and IMS, but really they are complementary technologies, with the point of integration being standard IMS interfaces into an SDP application server. Both help to move carriers away from stovepipe architectures: IMS at the call control layer, SDP at the application layer.

“There's going to be a tight relationship between IMS and SDPs,” Yankee Group's Partridge said. “But new service creation needs to go beyond IMS.”

At the recent Telephony LIVE show in Dallas, one of the most repeated questions was “IMS or Web 2.0: What is the future of service creation?” As we've begun to see, it's a question plagued by faulty logic from the start.

Until now, many carriers have certainly followed or touted the network-centric IMS framework as the path to next-generation services. And clearly Internet players have made hay pursuing Web 2.0 technologies. But the path to the future for carriers is clearly IMS (as an IP-based replacement for legacy SS7/IN networks) plus Web services APIs (as a replacement for more wired-level network feature interfaces) plus Web 2.0 (as one of several future application-creation styles, particularly focused on apps that mash together functionality from multiple quarters). At each level, complexity is abstracted away, enabling less and less specialized developers to build sophisticated telecom-enabled applications.