Out the door and into the street: A software-driven approach to service creation can give carriers more flexibility

Internet service providers face an increasingly puzzling environment in this era of the $19.95 "all-you-can-eat" billing model. Large ISPs get by on volume; smaller ISPs struggle as they realize that the cost of expanding their network resources would far exceed the short-term profits.

What's needed to vault this hurdle is the ability to offer new services, something that only recently has become practical and economical for smaller ISPs.

Traditional telecommunications carriers face the same hurdle. While it is perhaps not so dire a financial position as it is for the "garage" ISPs of the world, it is instead an emerging environment of competition, churn and increased emphasis on providing new services to customers through the old interface of the telephone.

In the past, new services were made possible by switch manufacturers and other vendors creating new "boxes" to handle one service at a time, an expensive and difficult-to-manage approach. Now, with the pressing need for carriers to differentiate themselves, changes at the hardware level do not present a viable solution because of the cost and time involved.

"Carriers simply can no longer afford to stick devices throughout the network that perform one service function," says Steve Adams, director of service management for Crosskeys, a communications systems management software vendor in Kanata, Ontario.

"Not only is that hugely expensive in terms of the cost of the equipment, but it also forces a huge management cost on the carrier and takes a long time to fully deploy. All three of those are strikes in this market," he says.

Letting go of a legacy Luckily, the advent of intelligent network technologies over the last 20 years pointed to the direction carriers would need to take and gave vendors a head start in designing systems to a standard. Industry trends show that the worldwide OSS and service provisioning markets are expected to explode during the next few years (Table 1).

IBM's Multiple Services Platform/6000 uses the Intelligent Service Control Point System developed by Bellcore to harness intelligent network capabilities already in the network and tie them to new software-based services as they are created.

"Our view is that the use of intelligent networks is the best way to move functionality for these services from the switched network," says Russell Stanners, director of systems solutions for IBM's Global Telecom and Media Industries Unit.

The MSP/6000 is a flexible, open platform designed to allow developers and carriers to quickly build customized voice, data and multimedia services such as interactive voice response, messaging and other applications on a single platform. The system is scalable and can be used in conjunction with the Space System-the ISCP software's service creation and provisioning tool-for service development, testing and deployment.

Although interfaces for subscriber administration, billing, statistics and system administration systems are built into the MSP/6000 platform, Stanners admits that the biggest challenge in implementing the system in the carrier world was the complexity of the heterogeneous networks with which the system must work.

"Interoperability is a big problem," Stanners says. "If everyone stuck with the same equipment, it would be easy, but we have to coexist with a huge number of legacy systems that aren't going to go away any time soon. We have to work with the various switch vendors and study the different interfaces and different network entry points and look at each vendor's testing. A major part of supplying the platform is not just delivering the product itself, but a solution stack of software on top of that to allow it to work with the legacy equipment."

Northern Telecom recently introduced DMS-Programmable Services Architecture (PSA), which integrates off-board call processing and control with a group or "building-block" intelligent service platform. Nortel took a more modular approach to allow smaller vendors to scale up their service offerings as they grow, rather than forcing them to invest in a large and expensive platform up front. Unlike stand-alone platforms, the Nortel system is available on the company's DMS-250 SuperNode long-distance and DMS-500 local/long-distance switching systems.

DMS-PSA consists of the DMS-250 Programmable Services Node software and the DMS-PSA ServiceLink Platform, which is composed of the ServiceLink application protocol interface, service control unit and media resource unit platforms. The service control unit and media resource unit are Unix-based peripheral service systems that feature an object-oriented service creation framework. This enables the service provider to create enhanced intelligent network applications.

The system's Programmable Services Architecture gives service providers the ability to program the DMS-250 and DMS-500 switches by passing control of call processing and in-switch resources to an off-board processor. This eliminates the need to have stand-alone programmable switches in the network, thus overcoming issues of complexity, management, reliability and scalability.

Nortel and IBM aren't the only major vendors moving toward a platform that will take advantage of intelligent network capabilities.

Hewlett-Packard and Siemens Stromberg-Carlson have joined forces to develop a Telecommunications Management Network-based platform to provide core functionality for the Optimized Network Management System, Siemens' product portfolio for the introduction of new services.

And Ericsson resells Architel's automatic service activation program and increases its value by developing interfacing software for it and other products.

"Down the road, switching equipment increasingly will become a commodity," says Dave Curry, a co-founder and senior vice president of global business development for Architel. "We have to continue to work to find ways to differentiate switches by making them flexible enough to cope with demands for new services from both carriers and end users."

The server solution While carriers always have turned to switch vendors for new services deployment, a second group of vendors is trying to split service tasks from the switch. These vendors contend that a layer of servers integrated into the network for new services is the only viable way to provide the flexibility needed in the rough-and-tumble emerging market.

"Switch software is designed to be efficient and reliable, but not flexible," says John Mechling, director of product marketing for Stratus Computer. "It's slow to emerge from the switch vendors and takes a while to be deployed through the network, and with the environment we're in, that model just won't work."

Instead, carriers undergoing the re-engineering process are looking at platforms that easily can be integrated into their networks and can be adapted to deliver, bill and manage new services with server technology, which quickly can be modified with the addition of new software.

"Carriers, whether they're traditional Bell regional holding companies or [ISPs], are being forced to sell their products in different ways today," says Sam Liss, vice president of corporate marketing for Dialogic. "No longer is it just dial tone. Now it has to be a more interesting dial tone with new and different services available to the customer. Using the new generation of servers as a basis for this can help power those opportunities."

Some companies, including Stratus and its partner, IEX Corp., are trying to leverage the other great software-associated phenomenon of competition-local number portability-by providing a platform that meets portability requirements and new service needs.

The solution combines the Nexus service control point software component of IEX's DaVinci node with Stratus' Continuum fault-tolerant hardware to create a reliable, carrier-quality solution (Figure 1).

While the selling point of the moment is the system's number portability capabilities, the platform also provides carriers with a means to offer services such as call screening, conferencing, "find me, follow me" features, virtual private networking, personal number billing and caller ID. The platform also can be adapted to allow quick and inexpensive deployment of new services-an important consideration as carriers contemplate rolling out services that customers may not embrace right away.

"There are a lot of ideas out there for new services, but it's hard to justify the cost of deploying them if a service provider has to install all new equipment to offer them," says Gary Crockett, president and chief executive officer of IEX. "With the service node, they can introduce new services almost at will. If they work, great, and if no one buys them, they haven't lost any money in new equipment. It lets service providers innovate with new services and still have peace of mind about their investment."

Instead of relying on IEX to create custom software to deploy new services, several customers have used the system's rules-based structure to create their own solutions, Crockett says. "There's usually one anchor application, like [local number portability], that justifies the initial cost of the system, and then all the other applications are gravy," he says.

Working in a similar vein, Dialogic is using the high-performance, symmetrical multiprocessing Enterprise 450 workgroup server from Sun Microsystems to create its own platform for carriers to deploy new services. The two companies will jointly develop applications that will enable software developers to use the server as a platform to deliver sophisticated switching, messaging and information access solutions for enterprise and public networks.

Using new server technologies also could pay benefits down the road as the Internet becomes a more ubiquitous element of the services that carriers deliver to customers, Dialogic's Liss says.

"What's going to enable Internet commerce to take off? The ability for people in call centers to use the Web as a tool to help get services to their customers," Liss says. "Today, most companies' Web sites and call centers are separate and often managed by different departments. With powerful workgroup servers and the proper interface components, you'll see these two communications vehicles merged."

A software-driven network Another powerful tool for building new services is common object request broker architecture (CORBA), which will help carriers and vendors solve interconnection problems within their heterogeneous networks. CORBA will allow applications to be created quickly and function in the heterogeneous network environments typical of the telecom world, according to Craig Russell, director of product architecture for Fremont, Calif.-based Versant Object Technology.

One application is the Orbix+Versant Adapter, a merging of Versant's Release 5.0 object database and the Orbix object request broker from Iona Technologies, an object-oriented software vendor based in Cambridge, Mass.

The Orbix+Versant Adapter offers customers a simple and consistent interface between the object request broker and the object database management system (ODBMS) where those objects are stored.

Uniting these two components will speed up development time and allow new services and management techniques to reach users much faster. The two elements of the system are designed to fulfill discrete and complimentary functions. The object request broker is intended to distribute objects' behavior. The ODBMS distributes objects' status, allowing those objects to be reused and refreshed as often as needed and ensuring that they run in identical form.

"The idea is to put these two components into an architecture that's friendly to the telecom world," Russell says.

While there clearly are a wide variety of approaches to service creation, some factors remain the same regardless of the technology used to handle the issue.

Once new services are created, "you've got to make the services easy-to-use if you expect anyone to use them at all," says Jonathan Usher, telecom marketing manager for Microsoft. He notes that most services provided through the traditional telecommunications interface-the telephone-require users to memorize a sequence of numbers or to go through a time-consuming provisioning process.

"The telephone keypad is not intuitive when it comes to advanced services," says Usher. "It works wonderfully for placing and receiving calls, but the new services go beyond that."

Microsoft and Digital Sound Corp. are testing a Web-based system that lets the end user set up services with the aid of a visual control panel. Dubbed the Telecom Dashboard, the site provides a graphical representation of service controls for functions like messaging, call forwarding and other services.

"Studies have found that most of the people who use these enhanced services are also likely to have access to a computer and the Internet," says Usher. "This is a way of matching the service with the most efficient means of controlling the service."

The Telecom Dashboard links to the carrier's legacy systems through a component object model that runs on a Windows NT server. "The [component object model] approach is great for allowing Unix-based applications, like Digital Sound's unified messaging software, to work in an NT environment," Usher says. "It took just two weeks for Digital Sound to create the object for the Dashboard."

Regardless of the approach taken, the creation and deployment of new services will increasingly rely on integrated, standards-based solutions and less on customized approaches.

"Custom solutions are time-consuming to create, difficult to modify and expensive to turn off when a service fails," says John English, product marketing manager for Stratus.

"A platform- and software-based approach reduces costs and increases flexibility. As the carriers come to depend more and more on new services as a bottom-line, profit-generating part of their businesses, it's going to be clear that they're relying on a software-driven network."