Adding SOA to the OSS blueprint

Phase III Catalyst projects do more than provide a proof-of-concept. By the third phase, the expectations are higher. For France Telecom, the sponsor of the NGN OSS Blueprint Catalyst project, and all other participants, the expectation is for a real-world solution that bridges the gap between service creation, product management and service fulfillment for IMS and other converged services infrastructure.

Along with France Telecom, BEA Systems, Ceon, Cognizant Technology Solutions and Pantero have worked through the first two phases of this Catalyst project. Those companies were joined for Phase III by NetCracker Technologies.

Sajith Sankar, the project team leader from Cognizant, said Phase I (Dallas 2005) looked at New Generations Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) contracts from a TMF perspective and compared that to the 3GPP perspective (IMS) in order to understand the similarities and differences.

"It was sort of a feasibility study to determine if the 3GPP standard could be expressed in contract terminology that would work in a TMF environment," said John Wilmes, the project charter author from Ceon.

Phase II (Nice 2006) then modeled this scenario using TMF standards. The first two phases were called, "Implementing Contract-based Service in NGN" or ICON. Now in Phase III, the group has added a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to the mix.

"The purpose of this Catalyst is to show that we can deliver converged services, and IMS is the key that makes this project different from others," Sankar said.

It also is different in that the group is designing a real solution that service providers need today, said Idir Fodil, IP architect for France Telecom. "We are addressing real service provider deployment by addressing how new OSS/BSS technology works with new generation networks based on 3GPP IMS, ETSI and T1Span specifications," he said.

Fodil can't say at this point if his company will use this particular solution. "We are studying all possible solutions. We think that the future of NGN OSS is to use a combination of what is produced by the TMF and other standards bodies around a SOA," he said.

The demonstration at TMW in Dallas will highlight the group's "blueprint" for service delivery. It will include service creation, ordering, fulfillment, and subscriber parameter management and usage. The end-to-end OSS solution will be prototyped and implemented to support a weather alert notification service for residential customers and will be the first, they claim, where all the software components communicate using web services in a true SOA. The SOA framework will include XML/SOAP, WSDL and UDDI technologies.

It also is the first to use detailed NGOSS Contracts for service interfaces. A contract is a specification of the conditions and details under which new application performance systems interact with each other, Wilmes said.

"NGOSS contracts are a very important aspect of the technology-neutral architecture and are increasingly looked at by service providers as a way of guaranteeing interoperability between applications and documenting and assuring smooth integration," Wilmes said.

Introducing SOA into the telecom environment will take time. Fodil said we will not see a complete SOA for a few years. "One of the challenges we have at France Telecom is moving from existing information systems to ones based on SOA, and we have found that you have to move step by step."

Ultimately the project hopes to show a true SOA being used in a real-world situation for end-to-end fulfillment and to show the use of NGOSS contracts. "According to the results we have seen from this project so far, we think moving from current OSS solutions to a SOA using NGOSS contracts and addressing NGN challenges is not impossible," Fodil said.