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In the current market, any new framework must first reduce, not increase integration costs. Therefore, it should protect preexisting enterprise investments. It must also provide the robust performance and scalability typical of telecommunications operations systems. An appropriate solution will allow for the abstraction of network elements and business processes to make service-creation processes simple yet flexible.
For service providers, a sophisticated application services framework has provided just this capability. Immediate applications of the new technology include extending interfaces for real-time billing mediation, customer care, and provisioning, thereby solving the application integration problem at the point of the greatest need. However, operations professionals have confirmed that this stage is just a beginning. Users of application services framework have begun to discover a potential that extends far beyond mediation and involves the design of a new, adaptable service-development framework.
Transitioning to New Service Models
Application services frameworks represent a new approach to simplify and manage the growing complexity of service deployments. Application services frameworks integrate object management group (OMG)/UML–based object-modeling tools with infrastructure runtime engines to deliver distributed application performance, scalability, and recovery.
The benefits of application services frameworks vary, based on the desired level of abstraction. Reduced to pragmatic terms, these benefits are as follows:
- reduced technology integration costs and shorter project times
- expandability and reuse; creating a service management strategy that can adapt to changing market demands
Developers and managers are beginning to articulate a change in the way they think about services planning. They realize that mediation in the IT context and service creation in the network element context are basically the same thing. An application services framework offers them an exciting advance in the use of modeling to extend mediation into a more comprehensive, rapid service execution and deployment platform that spans both arenas.
Adding Momentum: Internet Delivery and E-Commerce
Electronic bill presentment and payment is an example of Web-based service interfaces that give the customer an electronic connection to the service provider back-office systems. The Web browser is a powerful tool in delivering new services and supplementing existing services. By adding a new form of interface with the customer, however, service providers will open up Pandora's box, creating a set of integration requirements several orders of magnitudes greater than exist today.
In the case of e-commerce, services are not defined vertically by the service provider. Instead, they are shared across interfaces between service providers and their customers. E-commerce services differ from billing and provisioning mediation because, in e-commerce applications, the electronic transaction interface is the service. This is a significant distinction; e-commerce revolves around the integration of transactions across enterprises and escalates the need for the type of integration that bogs down service delivery timetables and drives up costs.
However, the service provider has already added electronic payment capability to the provisioning framework, and in so doing, has created a new service. For service providers, using an application services framework for mediation solves much of the service creation and integration problem.
More significantly, however, an application services framework facilitates e-commerce by providing a basis for real-time management of interactions between network transactions and data sets from individual service applications. In e-commerce, an execution engine or event bus provides the real-time coordination with off-network services such as third-party authentication, payment, and processing services.
Meeting New Services Requirements
Transactional management requirements will outstrip the performance levels of traditional enterprise integration tool sets, and they emphasize the immediacy of the new requirements set for services. An application services framework holds great promise to meet the unique requirements of next-generation telecommunications service creation (see Figure 9).
Figure 9. A New Application Services Framework
Mediation with an application services framework allows telecommunications companies to draw on all of the resources required for service creation today, which integrates an interconnected model—where enterprises and individuals can define their own services. Examples of these services include access provisioning, virtual private networks (VPNs), quality-of-service (QoS) networks, network roaming, and e-commerce.
Using an application services framework as the services platform, with existing telecommunications mediation and enterprise application integration tools as migration and development partners, service providers are learning to trump the inherent limitations of integration and to meet the need for fast-launch, quick-cost-recovery services management.
