OPEN WIDE

Using Web 2.0, Web services and SOA to beat Internet competitors at their own game.

For telecom service providers to beat their Internet and IT competitors at the service game, the best approach may not be to draw up better plays but rather to sneak over to the other side and steal their opponents' playbook altogether.

The key word in any such plan is “open”: open interfaces, open development processes, and more open and plentiful developer ecosystems that move telecom beyond yesterday's wire-level application programming interfaces (APIs), proprietary vendor applications and siloed service delivery approaches.

That's the Web way. It certainly hasn't been the telecom way.

A move in that direction, however, not only levels the playing field, it also marries the worlds of enterprise and Web application development and telecom service creation like never before — one crucial step down the path toward truly converged IP services.

All too often today, next-generation service creation discussions bog down in false dichotomies such as IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) vs. Web 2.0 or Web services vs. session initiation protocol (SIP). The truth is, service providers need to take an “and” approach that enables the exposure of legacy systems, networks and standards while designing a new path to service and application development fit for the still-emerging world of IP protocols, XML-based application interfaces and distributed service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

“With the implementation of IP technologies in general, carriers have moved to a much more software-oriented model,” said Brett Azuma, president of research firm Ovum North America. “The central office increasingly looks much more like a data center than a telephony network. You see rows of rack-mounted servers and the like, and the hardware isn't tied tightly to proprietary software.”

Despite talk about new technologies and protocols, at the end of the day the evolution of carrier service creation cuts to the core of the evolution of carrier business models.

“It comes down to the fundamental issue that for traditional operators, their core businesses are under duress. That means going from a network that was very siloed and proprietarily integrated to embracing next-generation service delivery architectures — not to mention new business models,” said Brian Partridge, an analyst for Yankee Group. “We're still in the very early days, but all of this is cause for transformation beyond just the network. It touches on organizational structure, business philosophy, and service design and deployment.”

Because so much is at stake — and the technologies involved, both new and legacy, are so complex — service providers often are criticized for moving too slowly to develop these new service capabilities. Almost every day, an Internet player — from Amazon to Google to Microsoft — rolls out new, lightweight Web services APIs. Increasingly, voice-over-IP and SIP-based competitors are experimenting with building Web-centric APIs to VoIP-based call control capabilities that can be rapidly “mashed up” into new composite applications spanning the Web and voice worlds.

But it's wrong to underestimate incumbent carriers in this effort. According to sources, early experiments at BT, Korea Telecom, Sprint, Telefonica, 3 and elsewhere are paving the way. And vendors from the traditional IT market — players such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, Sun and others — report that their story of transforming the telco back office with IT technologies is beginning to resonate with service providers.

Carrier networks are opening up. It's a story that starts in the middle of the network/application stack, with increasingly sophisticated service delivery platforms (SDPs) becoming the drivers of new service creation and integration.

From there, the story extends down the stack with new IMS capabilities and more horizontally integrated operations support systems and business support systems (OSS/BSS) increasingly ruled by SOA principles. It then heads northward into APIs and code libraries that can be consumed more easily by tools ranging from enterprise integrated development environments (IDEs) such as the open-source Eclipse to more lightweight approaches ranging from new Web/telecom mashup editors to scriptable widgets to Ruby on Rails-style rapid application development.

Hovering above it all — informing new business models and driving new partnership approaches — is the specter of increased competition and lost revenue if service providers can't find a better way to play the open services game.