Service Delivery Platform

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The term Service Delivery Platform (SDP) refers to a recently embraced architectural style applied to telecommunications infrastructure problems. It is intended to enable rapid development and deployment of new converged multimedia services, from basic POTS phone services to complex audio/video conferencing for multiplayer games (MPGs). SDPs typically provide a service creation environment, a service execution environment, and abstractions for media control, presence/location, integration, and other low-level communications capabilitities. SDPs are applied to both consumer and business applications, with the latter set often focused on the integration of telecom and IT capabilitities.

Although telecommunications companies like Nortel, Avaya, Lucent and Alcatel have provided communications integration interfaces and infrastructure since the early to mid 1990s, the cost-saving success of IP-based VoIP systems as replacements for proprietary PBX systems and desktop phones has prompted a revolutionary shift in industry focus from proprietary systems to open, standard technologies. As much as this change has been a tremendous selling point for new systems from traditional vendors, it has also opened the door of the telecom closet to traditional IT vendors like IBM and Oracle, who are developing or have developed SDPs of their own. However, the fundamental aspects of a SDP is that it must be centered on the new "point of presence". This is the point of user access to their converged services where their preferences and entitlements are evaluated in real time. Preference and entitlement processing ensures that the user's services in their device/location contexts are delivered correctly. As entitlements are related to the product and service management regimes of the operator, the core architecture of an SDP should define managed products, services, users, preference and entitlement processes.

Some example applications of an SDP:

  • Users can see incoming phone calls (Wireline or Wireless), IM buddies (PC) or the locations of friends (GPS Enabled Device) on their television screen
  • Users can order VoD (Video On Demand) services from their mobile phones or watch streaming video that they have ordered as a video package for both home and mobile phone
  • An airline customer receives a text message from an automated system regarding a flight cancellation, then opts to use a voice self-service interface to reschedule

Contents

[edit] History

The late 1990s saw a period of unprecedented change in enterprise applications as the grip of client-server architectures gradually relaxed and allowed the entrance of n-tiered architectures. This represented the advent of the application server, a flexible compromise between the absolutes of the dumb terminal and the logic-heavy client PC. Although entrants into the application server ring were many and varied, they shared common advantages: database vendor abstraction, open standard (mostly object-oriented) programming models, high availability and scalability characteristics, and presentation frameworks, among others. These transformations were triggered by business forces including the rampaging tidal wave that was the Internet boom, but none of it would have been possible without the proliferation of standards such as the TCP/IP protocol, the Java programming language, and the J2EE web applcation server architecture. It is against this backdrop of transformation that telecom's era of rapid change was set in motion.

Up until the first few years of 2000, the markets for commercial and business telecommunication technologies were still saturated with proprietary hardware and software. Vendors such as Lucent Technologies, Nortel, and AT&T jousted for position in the consumer and enterprise telecom markets, continuing to build giant business PBX systems that would speak only to their own digital telephones via proprietary protocols, and to sell huge central office switching equipment that offered traditional robustness, but very awkward customization capabilitites. This all changed with the rapid expansion of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) for transmission of voice data over packet networks and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for standardized media control, especially regarding enterprise voice communication.

In this new standards-supported environment, convergence of the voice and data worlds has become less a moniker for disastrous telecom/IT integration attempts and more a true avenue for the production of new and better consumer and business services. The last few years have seen the introduction or proliferation of various SIP programming libraries (reSIProcate, Flextronics) and products based on the relatively new SIP Application Server standard, and the IP Multimedia Subsystem standard defined by the 3GPP has gained a huge following. The Service Delivery Platform, whose power comes in large part from the quality and acceptance of these supporting standards, is rapidly gaining acceptance as a widely applicable architectural pattern.

[edit] Elements of an SDP

[edit] Service Creation Environment

Often a telecom software developer's primary access point, the Service Creation Environment (SCE, also Application Creation Environment or Integrated Development Environment) is used by the developer to create software, scripts, and resources representing the services to be exposed. These can range in complexity from basic Eclipse plug-ins (as with Ubiquity's UDE, or Ubiquity Development Environment) to completely abstracted, metadata-driven telecom application modeling applications (like Avaya's discontinued CRM Central product).

The purpose of the SCE is to facilitate the rapid creation of new communication services. Ignoring factors like marketing for the moment, the easier it is for developers to create services for a given platform, the greater will be the number of available services, and thus the acceptance of the platform by the broader telecom market. Therefore, a telecom infrastructure provider can gain significant advantage with an SDP that provides for rapid service creation.

[edit] Execution Environment

[edit] Media Control

[edit] Presence/Location

see presence paper at wwite.com [1]

[edit] Integration

[edit] Relationship to SOA

Much has been made in recent years of the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) concept. Discussions that once centered on Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies and concepts have shifted into the SOA domain, favoring ideas like service composition over simple message adaptation and extract, transform, and load (ETL) techniques.

SOAs can be used as an application integration technology within an SDP but are best served when used in the lower performance functions such as connections between the transactional OSS and BSS applications and the SDP. SOAs need careful consideration if they are to meet the real time demands placed on the SDP by the converged event type services.

see SOA page at wwite.com [2]

[edit] The Reality of Implementing SDPs

Considerable changes in IT architecting are required when implementing real world, real time, converged services, operational SDPs.

Many of the technologies and tool kits provided today still leave two fundamental issues to the operator or implementor. These issues are:

  • What are the goods and services being offered and managed in a real time fashion by the operator and by the customer self care systems - and this includes the management of presence based services (the world of the event driven internet) and how realtime use entitlements are processed.
  • What is the converged services information model used in the SDP design that represents the online business of the operator that has subscribers, devices, phone calls, preferences, entitlements, address books etc to deal with. In many cases MSOs with just 10 million customers require a SDP with 500 million information items - and for these items to be accessed many thousands of times a second by many different SDP functions.

These two major system requirements actually dictate architecture of a real world operational SDP regardless of the "abstract labels" one applies to its logical models, SOAs, message bus protocols and server interconnects. In many cases these fundamental issues are omitted from the SDP design leaving the operator with many business, service management and operational problems to address, such as:

  • identity management (of all the information in the SDP representing the operators online assets),
  • the SDP's service agility (that is the product and services being offered are hard coded into the SDP so that new services cause code upgrades) and;
  • hard wired self care facilities (no flexibility or consideration of the SDPs users such as language, age, sighted, preferences, etc).

Many MSOs world wide are demanding real time agile service management and self care systems. Many are evaluating situations where they have millions of lines of hard coded product and service management flows in their systems and are unable to move to the newer converged service dimensions.

A quick test of a SDP design is to evaluate its information model and see if that is based on the user environments of converged services, and see how that model is used and managed by all the systems that need to.

In support of SDP development and the evolution to real time, agile services delivery, next generation systems must be considered.

See wwite papers on SDPs, presence services CADS and CADS SDP at wwite.com for further information. [www.wwite.com].

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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