The missing piece in service-oriented networks

(Third in a three-part series. Read part one and part two.)

The telecom industry has seen a blizzard of software developers kits (SDKs) and open application programming interface (API) introductions in recent years. While these efforts by the telcos to open their networks are noteworthy, there’s a desire to build on this theme in an effort to ease the integration of Web 2.0 applications into the telco world.

These API and SDK tools and interfaces may work within specific silos, like within IMS networks or for Web 2.0 applications, but not both. And sometimes these tools don’t even allow interoperability among different applications within a single silo.

“Eclipse is popular software development environment,” says Andrew White, director of NGN architecture at Qwest Communications. “A lot of our suppliers deliver modules that can be used in Eclipse for service development. But try to go to vendor A and get all their stuff and put it in Eclipse, and then go to Vendor B and get all their stuff and put it in Eclipse. They don’t work together. It’s a separate but equal environment.”

Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest and chair of the ATIS TOPS council when the SON Focus Group was formed, adds that although SOA standards have begun to take shape in the application and server market, there is a widespread belief that further standardization within the networking space would be beneficial on many fronts.

“SON seeks to allow for greater scale and consistency in telecommunications; but, more importantly, it provides for a framework of interoperability with other IT standards,” says Poll, adding that it will lay the foundation for business-class cloud services.

Qwest’s White likes to compare the SON approach to rock soup -- for which everyone brings an ingredient to the party and dumps it into a big pot.

“When you look at Web 2.0 you’ve got extensive service capabilities, you have this big development community,” says White. “You look at IMS and they’ve got real-time services, they’ve got session-oriented capabilities, and it also supports mobility. And you’ve got SOA as well, and SOA from a classic IT perspective has this very large inventory of capabilities too and the biggest one is probably virtualization, which really started in the IT space, and the other is the Enterprise Service Bus.”

But while Web 2.0 has a large stable of developers and some important tools, White says that it lacks the well-defined interaction environment found in IMS.

“If you work in the Web space, you have to do a lot of integration to get services from different companies to work together,” White explains. “There is standardization [in Web 2.0], but it is at a low level. It is like standardizing the size of a brick and expecting two masons to build the same house.  There are building codes, engineering principles, etc., on how the bricks are used. These higher level rules do not exist with Web 2.0 today.  That is the problem that SON will solve. ”

Given the vast amount of metadata, says Mark A. Wegleitner, senior vice president of corporate technology at Verizon Communications Inc., there has to be a way to manage the data and point to the relevant class of applications.

“It is certainly not clear that the Web 2.0 world is equipped to manage such data without the orchestration that SON brings to the table,” adds Wegleitner. “The network can play an important role here, with a solid foundation in structures such as the Home Subscriber Server (HSS) of IMS.”