OPEN WIDE

NORTHBOUND TO THE FUTURE

Next-generation service creation and delivery is where the flash and glitz reside: Web 2.0 mashups, SOA composite services and the like. It's also where the competition is: an array of Web players and SIP/softswitch providers building consumable APIs of their own, and unified communications vendors aiming to put software smarts behind the firewall rather than in the network cloud. It's also where service providers need to consider a fork in the path: Do they become true service providers, or do they assume the role of pipe providers? (And not dumb pipes — there's too much intelligence in IP networks to call any network “dumb.”)

It's not an all-or-nothing decision. Even in these early days, some carriers are experimenting with a range of approaches to exposing network and application interfaces to open up their networks. One angle is to move to more open application architectures to simplify service creation for the carriers themselves and their key vendor/system integration partners. A second option is to open up the sandbox even further to a larger group of trusted partners. The final approach is to publish APIs and release software development kits (SDKs) for anyone to download and build telecom-enabled services.

Although still nascent, there's plenty of innovation in this final area of telco mashups and Web 2.0-style service creation. BT remains the best service provider example, with regular SDK updates and a vibrant developer community growing up around its Web21C project. On the vendor side, Microsoft — as part of its Connected Services Framework — has been letting carriers and partners experiment with mashed-up services in its Connected Services Sandbox at networkmashups.com. IBM, in turn, has delivered its Innovation Factory product, a Web 2.0-style social development environment in which carriers and their partners can brainstorm new service ideas and expose network features as consumable widgets in order to develop their own composite offerings.

For carriers to pursue this more flexible service creation model, however, they need to do the grunt work at the lower levels of the network. “If you are going to do exposed services, you have to have the right infrastructure in place to create and manage those services,” IBM's Greisinger said. “It's going to be very hard to build a services widget for people to mashup out of a monolithic system.”

IBM, for instance, is working with a carrier that says it wants to unleash a “million services” via a Web 2.0-centric development model. There's a lack of control in such an environment that's many steps removed from the controlled, incremental rollout of new services focused on increasing average revenue per user.

“If service providers are looking for the ‘killer app,’ it might be this more open development environment itself — with a killer portfolio of service enablers and the innovation ecosystem built up around it,” said Ken Lee, director of worldwide product marketing for BEA.

Which brings us back full circle to telecom service operators stealing a page from the architectural playbook of Internet and enterprise players. In the end, such an approach not only allows them to compete with those companies, it enables them to take a spot on the playing field as equals and work together to deploy next-generation services.

“It is critical that all successful operators strike up strong partnerships with the significant players in the Internet and enterprise space, including Google, eBay, Yahoo! and all the rest,” said Peter Mottishaw, analyst for OSS Observer. “That is one of the things that SDP platforms enable: allowing carriers to work closely with a broad range of partners and be more responsive to what the marketplace wants. For successful operators, that will be a clear differentiator in the future.”