SOA Online Summit

The North American SOA online summit is happening this Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008.

Local Times:
New York: 12pm – 4pm
Chicago:11am – 3pm
San Francisco:9am – 1pm

SOA online summit is a free online event that brings together architects, developers, practitioners and technology vendors to talk about best practices for SOA and advances in technology.

I did log in to the last Summit and the quality of presentations were fantastic.

IIW 2008b

A reminder the IIW 2008b is coming soon, please try to attend.
Meeting is in the usual place Computer History Museum
in Mountain View California from 10-12 November.

SOA Workshop: Telecom Standards Session

This session had 4 speakers:

• Hanane Becha, OMG
• Marco Carugi, ITU-T
• Musa Unmehopa, OMA
• Tony Richardson, TM Forum

• OMG
  Possible new OASIS WGs
  Extend WS protocols to allow the expression of the non-functional properties of services and support their discovery based on their NFP, enable testing …, address OMG resulting work to support SOA push model
  Develop lightweight Process-oriented runtime languages (e.g. BPEL) for composing modern time sensitive, context-aware Telecom services
  Harmonize complimentary OMG and OASIS standards such as BPEL with OMG BPMN

• OMA
  There are some concerns in OMA regarding the real-time, carrier-grade performance of BPEL, when policy processing is transparently applied to all requests in the OSE.
  For their Web Services related activities, OMA may benefit from the input and WS expertise of the OASIS Telecom Member Section… improvements to OWSER, PEEM

• TM Forum
  SDF initiative
  Bi-lateral collaboration in progress
  Specific issues from SDF as “proposals of improvement / gaps” on OASIS standards
  NGOSS Contracts: proposed for examination by OASIS

• ITU-T SG13
  Capabilities as service enabling toolkit
  Work Item on Open Service Environment capabilities for NGN: Working on Functional requirements for OSE
  Need to enhance existing collaboration with other SDOs

SOA Solutions in Telecom Today

SOA workshop session 2 SOA Solutions in Telecom Today has three speakers, Babak Sadighi, Axiomatics ; James Aitken, Aepona Ltd; Antonio Fontan, Microsoft.

Key messages

Axiomatics

• How does standardized authorization mnagement support SOA in Telecom Networks (focus on use of XACML, at service and device configuration level)
• Authorization is meant as a service to other applications and services
• As well as location, IPTV … it would be important to provide also Authorization as a “telecom service”
• Operators would like to avoid micro-management of services and features of service providers (avoid micro-management)
• SPs need to control their services themselves
• Gave examples on access permissions (e.g. end user access to service) and on specific services for users (e.g. parking service… different policies)
• Issues: policy enforcement, policy administration, attribute management
• Authorization service shall be provided by Operators to SPs and XACML 3.0 can play an important role

Aepona

• Core Telco service enablers: payments, messages, presence, location --> they are assets
• SOA is about the interface for 3rd parties to access such enablers
• 3 “killer capabilities”: contextual presence, location – flexible media and conference switching – Intelligent notification services
• WS for telecom exist: Parlay-X: enphasis must be put on refining and making them popular
• Concrete examples of application of WS in Telecom (automated appointment reminder, public sector property maintenance … enhanced)
• Real web services need policy and security control – SDOs must work on this
  

Microsoft Mediaroom

• Brand name for IPTV solution: platform for delivery of video over (reliable) IP network
• Broad view of the End-2-End IPTV solution: content acquisition, content protection, service management, subscriber management, service delivery, service consumption
• Provided high level view o the architecture
• SOA enables highly decoupled, modular and interoperable architecture
• Understood OSS and BSS functionalities applied to the platform

Use SOAP based web services

• Loosely coupled services

Lessons learned

• Web services ala RPC increased coupling and reduced agility
• SOAP limitations (exposing/retrieving large resources and low end hardware)
• It is critical adding better control for accessing server resources
• Modeling unknown applications is hard
• Saying “contract first” is not good enough

Future needs

• Better control of workflow
• Simplify access to resources to facilitate application extensibility
• Emphasis on modeling (access profiles, layering of interfaces)
• Need standards on SLA management
  

Challenges of Telecom Services in SOA Environment: Lessons Learned and Case Studies

This session had presentations from NEC Laboratories Europe, Vodafone , Telenor , Nortel ,Oracle and IBM.

Take away messages form this session

• Amardeo Sarma, NEC Laboratories Europe
• SWIFT project: solve identity fragmentation of today, develop EU identity architecture
• Virtual identities concept: many faces for transactions to separate roles or for privacy roles
• Concept of virtual identity applicable down to the network
• Defined a set of building blocks of an “Identity Architecture”
• Liberate user from device(s) by enabling use of several interchangeable devices
• Network Access automatically made available based on service requested
• Identity becomes a convergence technology: forms the bridge between networks, services, content…
• Objective is to bridge existing solutions together
• Proposal of the “identiNET” …
• Issue: who is accountable on the management of the “federation of identities” ?

Edin Bektesevic, Vodafone

• Operators want to use mature technologies o help them solve their problems
• Are WSs easing the integration?
• Is REST applicable to telecoms?
• Mash-ups; exciting, but realistic?
• Operators are recognizing user data as a corporate asset (not only for liability); NEW Cash flow potential with mobile advertisement
• SOA Standards must help Operators to manage such asset
• Operators are invited to provide requirements to the SDOs (e.g. OASIS Telecom MS)
• Operators need clear guidance on “minimum interoperable WS-stack” to use

Sune Jakobsson, Telenor

• Presented real-life experience in “ implementing / deploying’ SOA in Telenor
• What is the correct granularity of a SOA Service ?
• SOA Governance assumes key importance: OASIS standards must address this aspect (look at RA for SOA): Run-time (and off-line) SOA governance must be enabled

Will Hern, Nortel

• Within one case it was required us to go well beyond Parlay X and other telecom standards
• Interfaces need to be kept simple so that non-telecom developers could easily make use of them
• Need of mentality change: difficult not to expose “telecom” capabilities (such as session ids) to the application via APIs
• Many Internet developers struggle with the WS-* specifications: they expect REST-style interfaces instead
• Necessity to extend standards for location-setting and presence
• Need to change some BPEL specs? Customers are just beginning to experiment it – 1 more year to know
  

Martin Borrett, IBM

• Challenge emerges on identity and access management
• Need of support of virtual identity and the related trust framework – personalization and virtual identity
• Externalize policies (and security functions) from applications
• Open standards based approach is the way to go
• Need for real time distributed policy negotiation and enforcement: OASIS TMS must take this issue and promote its solution within the appropriate SDO
  

Stephane Maes, Oracle (TM Forum)

• Work for the enablement of lifecycle management of “services”, not only within one SP’s domain
• There may be some modifications to the OASIS SOA RM (SDF Service has > than 1 SI
• Touch points for OASIS TMS and TM Forum SDF

SOA Workshop: Panel on Embedding Communications into IT Applications

This post builds on Enrico Ronco from Telecom Italia summaries on the Messages from the Panel on "Embedding Communications into IT Applications: A Vendor Perspective". Participating companies are: Accenture, Avaya, Oracle.

Avaya

- Need for an agile communication creation environment

- Deliver different level of granularity for different customers

- OASIS can help in filling some gaps (i.e. security, manageability, serviceability of “communication platforms”)

- Occasion for a full automation of business processes (incl. manual processes) – gave examples (sales force automation, extension of communication services with enterprise folders

Accenture

- How to implement SOA in a holistic view? (need for a proper governance capability)

- 4 different levels of maturity of SOA adoption in Telcos: (Plan & Organize, Deploy, Architected, Industrialized). Not necessary to run through them in sequence.

- Understand customer need, make a plan, iterate within phases (level 3 is the most difficult)

- The whole is difficult: services delivered by consultants, but failure in the achievement of the full business value. Difficult for a department to pay for others. Short term funding.

- Gives us a “recipe” for SOA adoption in Telcos: 1) Define governance framework and decide key roles (who should sit in this “board”); 2) define quick goals …

Oracle

- Bridging the “Web” world with the “Telco” world, and “Traditional Telcos” have goals which are different from the “Internet SP”

- Concept of “Standard-Based Service Delivery Platform”: --> look at the OMA OSE

- Then a “process” is suggested for successful deployment of the “Standard SDP”

- Mention of TM Forum Service Delivery Framework (SDF)

- Mention of Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture

- No particular challenge in making things happen, but SOA is not yet "Carrier Grade"
- High availability, predictable low latencies, efficient, scalable …
- Difficult to guarantee throughput, SLA, QoS, lifecycle management of mash ups

SOA Workshop Key Note: Providers Perspectives on SOA in Telecom

During the SOA Workshop , Dave Elmendorf (BT) provided a key note on "Providers Perspectives on SOA in Telecom". During the workshop Enrico Ronco from Telecom Italia was kind enough to volunteer to summarize the key messages from the presentations in the workshop. He presented the key highlights at the last session of the workshop.

Here are some of the take home messages from the key note presentation by Dave Elmendorf (BT) (as summarized by Enrico Ronco).

- As Network Operator shift to become Service Provider they need to do business within “the long tail”. Communication with communities becomes important.
- Network Operator will need to focus on common capabilities to support the shift from vertical applications. As such, agnostic access to networks, common set of “components for services”: (profile, messaging, call servers, media servers…)is a must.
- Convergence between telecom “platforms” and enterprise “applications”: Network competences now merged with IT competences
- Common set of standards now available to enable “web platforms”
- Software Development moving from proprietary monolithic telecom applications to standards-based layered J2EE applications
- Be pragmatic in building the application layer (IMS lesson): understand what people want to do with services and select standard network components as mature technology emerges
- Focus effort on building applications customers really want (e.g. sales force management)
- Work to deliver “service building blocks”
- No Killer app. / Yes “Killer attribute”: ability to change rapidly