Creating The Future Service Delivery Environment Mode of Operations' Blueprint

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Service providers continuously expand and innovate their service offerings to address increasing competitive demands. Until recently, they have met this challenge by overlaying individual stovepipe services on their legacy and IP infrastructure. As end users value an enriched communication experience, service providers are faced with the need to enable blending and personalization of services to further enhance their competitive positioning. For example, service providers are combining conversational services with presence and digital television so an end user can see which friends are watching a particular TV show and subsequently chat with them and other viewers — all on the TV screen.

Delivering such services requires the sharing of information (such as user profiles and IP infrastructure resources) and of operational and business support functions. Some imply that it is possible to achieve these blended services through a unique Service Delivery Platform (SDP) that supports all types of services. Although an attractive idea, each type of service, such as those based on IMS or IPTV has considerably different requirements, which makes it unrealistic to assert that one single delivery paradigm would be able to optimally deliver all different services. Besides, different industry players will define SDP components in a different way and there is no industry consensus today for the definition of a SDP.

As competition increases and end users demand services that require blending capabilities from multiple SDPs, service providers are evolving their current platforms and rationalizing their service and network architectures. Thus, leveraging multiple service-optimized SDPs in an overall environment in which they inter-work is a natural step in the evolution towards new services.

Consequently, the Telemanagment Forum (TMF) has recently started standardizing the concept of Service Delivery Framework (SDF) so as to provide the terminology and concepts needed to reference the various components involved, such as applications and enablers, network and service exposure, and orchestration. The TMF uses these in the definition of the processes and entities needed for managing the SDF components. Several leading SDP and ISV suppliers including Alcatel-Lucent are active participants.

To offer optimal user experience and eliminate silo duplications and limitations, Alcatel-Lucent has created a blueprint where SDPs form a key base from which will emerge a gradual evolution to the Service Delivery Environment (SDE). The SDE is an open Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based framework that enables integration of service-optimized SDPs, such as IMS, web and IPTV and accelerates service innovation by binding their own and partner applications with network resources, using its intelligent delivery, personalization and blending capabilities.

The SDE provides a set of common enablers that break down or avoid service stovepipes created when introducing multiple SDPs by providing service enhancements and operations tools common to and shared across all types of services. See figure 1.

Figure 1

Accelerating innovation

The SDE is an open framework that accelerates service innovation and delivery of user-centric services by optimizing processes and resource management and reusing common components across different platforms. It provides the capability to create, provision, locate, deliver, personalize, bill, and manage services experiences across network technologies and devices.

This framework encompasses the services capabilities of traditional telecom and IT vendors. The SDE framework is not a “one size fits all”, but it can be tailored to each provider's individual market needs. It may draw upon the strengths of IMS, IPTV, Content Delivery, Messaging and other SDPs while sharing real-time rating and charging, presence, location, subscriber, network, and other information.

A key area of the SDE is the Service Factory, where service providers c reate personalized and blended services and innovate with third parties . These services may involve applications of multiple SDPs including video services, SIP services, legacy services and Internet services.

To deliver on the promise of rapid service creation quality of experience, the Service Factory relies on common enablers that support end-to-end service creation and delivery across the shared resources of the common IP network.

These enablers are grouped into three areas: Federated Control , Service Enhancements and Service Operations . They are accessible in real time by all services and provide the bridge between the services, the resources required to deliver those services and the related service operations applications.

Federated Control ensures QoE and delivers the service blend using service and session control applications of the SDPs, such as the S-CSCF for IMS, a video-on-demand server for IPTV, a SMS-C for mobile, as well as a service broker and a policy-driven dynamic resource controller to handle the services mix.

Service Enhancements enable personalization and leverage unique assets across SDPs. It uses data federation technologies in order to control sharing data such as user identities, location, presence and profile information across SDPs and third-party applications.

Service Operations optimizes processes, empowers end users and partners and involves network management, portals and other OSS /BSS. It includes such functions as Common Subscriber and User Profile Management, Payment and Content Management, Network and Service Resource Management, Service Fulfillment, Assurance and Service Creation.

Conclusion

Service providers are transforming their service delivery capabilities by eliminating service silo limitations whilst maximizing the value of service-optimized SDPs by re-using common capabilities like operations and network resources.

They can compete for new end-user demands with a modular evolution towards a simplified and effective service delivery capability by implementing a SDE framework, with Service Factory , Federated Control , Service Enhancements and Service Operations common components and by building a relationship with suppliers who understand both the IT application and the telecom network world.

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