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