How AT&T’s CTO sees service-oriented architectures

Service-oriented architectures are “hard to define but easy to recognize,” said John Donovan, AT&T’s chief technology officer. “What you do is you just ask how long it takes, and if the answer’s wrong, then it’s not a service-oriented architecture.”

“We use the principle of ‘us on us,’” he said, referring to AT&T services on AT&T’s network. “If we take an external developer and ourselves, we should not be advantaged in how long it takes or how much expertise is required. It needs to be that simple, because that would put the foundation in place for how to horizontalize all your platforms in a way. Far enough is when you’re on equal footing with anyone that externally would be looking to bind your network. Whether you’re reaching for physical assets, logical assets or into the IT systems, I don’t think it needs to be that complicated. You just have to say, ‘Is us on us the same as them on us?’”

Donavan made his remarks in a carrier CTO panel discussion Wednesday on the first morning of the Supercomm trade show.

“We have to prepare our networks for a world where the user experience is going to be [controlled by] any number of different companies unique to the individual user,” he said. “You have to deliver the full capabilities of your network so that the devices learn the person before the person learns the devices. And the network carries the intelligence to be able to deal with a really rapidly changing device and user-experience environment. If a company in Web 2.0 to 3.0 evolution does it right, they’ll rebuild our IMS systems over the next five to seven years, because the data model in that world stinks. It doesn’t transport very well.”

“To me, it’s not so much about the app,” he said. “It’s about building the infrastructure so that the data model and the app preference and the user experience can jump from devices and jump across platforms.”