As the telecommunications industry continues to build momentum and competition intensifies among the various players, service providers around the world face a daunting new set of challenges. Chief among these is the imperative to create, deploy and manage compelling, revenue-generating services that capture customers' imaginations and build their loyalty--and do so in a cost-effective manner. Networks are converging and the challenge is how to integrate these new services, which will consist of traditional voice services, Web services offerings and emerging IP multimedia subsystem architecture-based real-time, person-to-person multimedia services, in a meaningful way across multiple network types and generations.

The critical issue becomes how to get from where network operators are now, with siloed service creation and service execution environments, to the new world of IMS. IMS provides an open, IP-based service infrastructure that allows carriers to create and deliver real-time, person-to-person multimedia communication services that integrate traditional telecom, Internet and broadband capabilities, services and content. However, carriers need a strategy for enabling a smooth transition between the existing legacy networks of today and the emerging IMS network of tomorrow. The right approach is a common service delivery platform (SDP) architecture across both the legacy and future IMS environments.

Agnostic to underlying network types or generations, a common SDP bridges the networks of today and tomorrow by evolving the underlying network model to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This SOA model decouples underlying network resources from end-user service development and delivery, allowing each to evolve independently of one another. In practice, the distributed model simplifies service creation, composition and delivery, which in turn spur innovation from a much larger development community, which no longer is required to understand the network technology on which the service is built. This move to an SDP built on SOA principles is a very big first step toward IMS.

SDP first builds the base for this distributed model by utilizing re-usable network resources such as location, presence, group list management and messaging, that can then be leveraged across multiple end-user services. When coupled with a third-party service composition tool, these service building blocks can be leveraged not only by the operator, but also by outside developers, spurring innovation and accelerating time to market with new services.

To help service providers take advantage of these resources, an SDP also provides common service delivery functions, such as third-party service registration tools, device management, content delivery, thin device clients and interfaces into operations or business support systems--all functions that can be reused in the IMS environment--providing a high level of service continuity in the transition process. In addition, as SDP serves as a bridge between network types and generations, it also dictates how services will interact between legacy network environments and IMS, further simplifying the evolution.

In addition to evolving the architecture and offering re-usable components, moving to SDP first also allows service providers to test out this new distributed and converged services model first before incurring bigger costs around IMS. In essence, it provides a trial period so that carriers can ease their way into converged IMS services, and then hit the ground running when a full IMS infrastructure is deployed.

There's no doubt that IMS provides a superior infrastructure that enables flexible responses to market trends, but successful carriers will first need to implement a common SDP that gives operators time to perfect the new service delivery model, while enabling them to deliver innovative revenue-generating services today.

Peter Dragunas is director of Global NSP Network Solutions at Hewlett-Packard

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