PDF of this tutorial
In telecommunications, urgent customer demands for new services are outpacing the ability to deploy and manage them. As a result, service providers find themselves in a fast-paced race to develop a succession of new services for which predictable, long-term cost-recovery guarantees no longer exist. According to both business and engineering executives, this challenge is becoming more acute as the variety of services grows to incorporate customer-defined managed services and enhanced Web applications. In response, service providers are seeking to create a distributed application services model that looks less like the vertically integrated service creation of the past and more like distributed enterprise IT.
Despite the historical adaptation the industry has made to consolidate its network-side, service-creation resources, primarily through intelligent networks (INs), the models do not meet current needs.
Distributed Services Require Systemic Thinking
All services draw from a multitude of resources. Today, these resources must be increasingly coordinated in an automated and adaptable manner. Launch times are compressed, and service integration has therefore become more challenging at a time when new service projects are expected to recover costs rapidly. As a result, project managers face the danger of being whipsawed between the need to launch so many new services and the need to support each one continuously over a period of time.
Although the fundamental concept of services has not changed, these services increasingly require flow-through processes that automate back-office interactions with systems for billing, customer care, and provisioning. Historically, the weak link in service integration is the connection between network-focused service elements and back-office IT. Service providers are using mediation to eliminate manual processes and separate support infrastructures for services.
Expanding Mediation: Application Services Framework
To meet their most immediate needs, service providers are implementing a dramatic new form of mediation that allows them to overcome the difficulty of integrating billing call detail record (CDR) data across interconnection points and multiple services. By expanding mediation that employs a next-generation application services framework, these providers reap the advantages of fault-tolerant server performance and greatly simplified deployment capability. Service providers and integrators tell us that these benefits translate into faster, lower-cost rollouts and the reuse of objects for continued support.
