Service brokers link legacy, NGN

Goodness knows we don’t need another IMS/NGN product category, but service providers are finding they do need additional application-layer functionality to link legacy networks and services to new IP-based capabilities.

The Yankee Group is calling this new category “service brokers,” describing it as an offshoot and extension of the concept of the IMS service capability interaction manager (SCIM). While the SCIM worked only in an IMS architecture, the service broker sits between the TDM and NGN worlds and enables services to work across both networks. Specifically, a service broker would sit between the service and control layers and provide connectivity in ways that do not require either of those layers to be modified.

“The service broker is relatively new; vendors have been talking about it for some time, but it’s been getting more buzz lately,” said Yankee Group analyst Brian Partridge. “The product is aimed at bringing in the concepts of brokering and orchestration. The service broker bridges the legacy and NGN/IMS worlds.”

Partridge said that in addition to approximating the functionality of a SCIM, service brokers also could functionally fit within a larger service delivery platform (SDP ) architecture, which among its many capabilities, typically includes north- and south-bound service APIs that help bring together legacy network capabilities to newly built applications, Partridge said.

Service providers and vendors are consistent in describing IMS and NGN architectures as important for future services but challenging to implement in typical incumbent network environments that won’t make the wholesale leap to IMS overnight.

For instance, AppTrigger last week released a new version of its so-called application session controller that delivers the functionality of a service broker. “The fundamental problem with IMS is that it was built on a white blank sheet of paper with the assumption that it was going to be the sole network,” said Patrick Fitzgerald, AppTrigger’s vice president of global sales and marketing. “But there’s always going to be legacy infrastructure to manage and work with, and there’s always going to be the ‘next’ next network.”