SON opens door to Web 2.0 sales

(Second in a three-part series. Read part one here.)

While new service oriented networking (SON) offers telcos a chance to better use their resources and develop new services for residential and business customers, SON also is expected to open a world of new opportunity for telcos in terms of offering services to Web 2.0 entities.

John McCready, leader, Project Line Management-Carrier VoIP and Application at Nortel, says going across the platform, and leveraging wireless services’ capabilities -- from calling, to multimedia, to location based services, to Internet access -- creates even more interplay for SON operators, and enables exciting mash-ups that make use of all three 'networks. “They really haven’t exposed the combined intelligence of the user information and network services to any third party, so this is really a dormant revenue opportunity,” says McCready.

But there’s more to it than simply enabling telcos to appeal to a new group with existing services. After SON establishes a bridge between the telco and Web 2.0 worlds, a telco could potentially offer its billing capability, or other internal functions, to Web 2.0 customers – such as a SaaS company like Salesforce.com, for example.

“I know that some of the active members of this [SON] group are absolutely looking at offering capabilities such as billing and data storage as external services,” says Jim McEachern, manager of application enabler standards at Nortel, and a key contributor to the focus group that led to the ATIS SON effort. “They are looking to offer these things on a wholesale basis.”

Network operators expect to realize internal savings as a result of SON because both physical and logical resources can be reused rather than duplicated to support multiple services, and because telcos dramatically reduce integration costs.

“Think about the number of web servers out there,” says Andrew White, director of NGN architecture at Qwest Communications. “Apache Http server is used by 66 percent of the million busiest websites. Think about the reusability of that enabler. We’re seeing the same thing around messaging platforms, around media servers, where in the previous architecture we would have deployed those platforms over and over again; we would’ve paid maintenance over and over again; and done testing and integration over and over again. Essentially what we’re saying is we’re going to stop that.”

Convergence defined

If you followed the recent Convergence effort by ATIS, these ideas of resource reuse and fast service creation probably sound very familiar. That’s not surprising; given SON is an evolution of the Convergence work.

Through its Convergence activities, ATIS defined the business requirements around what it would take for telcos to continue to expand upon their success as broadband operators, explains White, who is one of the leaders of the SON Forum. SON takes that a step further by enabling telcos to implement those requirements in real-world networks and via actual applications, he explains.

“There’s a lot of coordination work that needs to be done in the realization of Convergence, basically, so all the pieces fit together,” White says. “It’s fine at the 50,000-foot view to say ‘I’m going to go to the TM Forum and I’m going to use their shared information data model as the model that I’m going to implement for my user profile.’ It’s another thing to get that to the point where you can actually code to it and write software. That’s really part of the objective as we drill down into these layers of detail – to get something that’s almost a network development kit.”

Creating this network development kit of sorts will be a tall order, requiring ATIS to settle on a wide range of standards and other accepted practices.
Mark A. Wegleitner, senior vice president of corporate technology at Verizon Communications Inc. and 2^nd vice chairman of the ATIS Board, explains that ATIS is taking a holistic view of service-oriented networks by focusing on open standards for SON policy and data models, operational and business support systems and service delivery requirements.
For example, one of the assignments of the Policy and Data Models Task Force is to agree on standard data structures within databases. It might seem like a small issue, but if one database uses the customer’s middle name and another database on which the same application relies uses just the customer’s middle initial, for example, significant integration costs for mapping between the two formats may be required.

“With SON, one of the goals, and this is actually the goal of the Policy and Data Models Task Force, is to say there are significant rub points in the data that’s associated with users and applications,” says Qwest’s White. “Let’s go seek out some of those key, high-use applications and do some standardization in terms of name space, in terms of schema.

“We’re not talking about standardizing the application that the end user sees themselves,” he adds, “but trying to get the point where if you go out and buy a contact database you can then buy or integrate with a software-as-a-service provider that uses contact data without spending six months and a million dollars on integration work.”

Similarly, today if you want to build a parental control application to work across game, TV and movie applications, it’s difficult because there are completely different rating engines associated with those various types of content, so a lot of integration is involved. But SON also aims to align metadata to enable applications to go multiplatform more easily.

Not only will that decrease complexity and costs for the telcos and the Web 2.0 development community, says White, it also will free end users from concerning themselves with what device or network their application runs over and allow them to focus just on what they want to accomplish.

“One of the drivers behind SON is really the user experience,” White says. “Today people are too focused on technologies. They know what EVDO is. They know what VoIP is. I don’t think they really know from a detailed perspective how it works, but they know all about these technologies. I think, personally, the reason that they know is because underneath the covers, these technologies are barriers to how they use their services. But if we do the job right, all of these technologies essentially melt into the background.”

But Wegleitner offers a reminder that while ATIS is developing an open standards approach toward service-oriented networks, the group is not developing the business model. “Ultimately, service providers and application developers must work together to assure that commercial arrangements are developed that are desirable to the consumer at both a monetary and customer experience level,” he notes.

As for Verizon’s specific efforts related to SON, Wegleitner says the company is assessing how SON can perform as a service architecture, and how the network and applications will relate to one another.

“Our initial view is that SON offers the potential to monetize a much wider range of applications (as each successive application becomes theoretically less expensive to develop),” he says. “The return on the network build investment can, of course, be increased by widening the range of services offered.

“In the end, the consumer will decide what services and applications meet their needs,” he concludes, “and SON is a means to help deliver this choice.”

NEXT: The Missing Piece

Paula Bernier, formerly editor in chief of xchange magazine, is a veteran telecom reporter. She prepared this article for ATIS.