PDF of this tutorial
IN provided a more distributed and flexible model that is the basis for service management processes in widespread use today. It also shows their limitations. A vertically defined customer service interface will not be able to support the new and emerging set of market demands that requires fast product rollouts and shortened lifecycle expectations, as well as customer self-management. New tools reduce these cost constraints, speed up implementations, and promise to extend the life of service creation environments, but their existence suggests a need for a new model to enable rapid and adaptable deployments customized using self-care interfaces. Furthermore, the long and growing list of distributed application services must increasingly work together.
For example, many enterprises are using an applications service overlay for electronic commerce (e-commerce) and enterprise applications, on top of VPN and Web-hosting services. Similarly, the management of e-commerce transactions, such as those needed for timing third-party interactions with credit clearinghouses, must be brokered between multiple network services and through the customer interface. Figure 10 depicts the changes that are part of a progression to increasingly complex service creation and management definitions.
Figure 10. Services Progression to Distributed Models
As service providers continue to add new, customer-defined and multiservice network features for enterprises and individuals, their need for a new services management framework is apparent. The success of these new services already depends on a new, more open, distributed, and flexible application service infrastructure. Because the ability to define services drives growth, many telecommunications professionals are actively asking a practical question with a sense of urgency: What will the new services creation framework be?
Next-generation services will reply upon service delivery across multiple physical networks, but customers will be able to manage them using an adaptable, distributed framework. Even the most immediate evolution to automated service provisioning and customer care will be impossible if multiple new services are merely overlaid on top of preexisting service designs. Consolidating the billing and customer-care interface is synonymous with the goal of next-generation service creation.
Just as object languages have replaced the need for hard coding and per-interface connections, a logically abstracted application service model eliminates the need for costly per-service and per-customer technology integration efforts.
