Over the past few years, the telecommunications market has been flooded with a myriad of innovative and industry-altering products and services. However, as network operators and service providers roll out these new applications and access technologies across 3G and 4G networks, they are still forced to generate replicated services across multiple network domains, including legacy networks.

This situation has created a need for solutions that offer providers and operators the ability to create products and services efficiently and cost-effectively across multiple network technologies. To answer this call, a coalition of vendors have come together to form The Service Broker Forum, whose main goal is to education and enlighten telecommunication companies about solutions that can help them deliver products and services over yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s networks.

To gain a better understanding of how service brokers’ address network challenges, TMC (News - Alert) recently put together a free webinar hosted by a number of industry leaders.

Presenters included Joe McGarvey, Sr. Principal Analyst at Current Analysis; Michel Arrede, Product Marketing Specialist for Amdocs (News - Alert)/jNetX; Chris Haddock, Manager of Alliances and Applications at OpenCloud; Jose Deras, Vice President of Sales Engineering at Metaswitch Networks; and Tal Zoller, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Oracle (News - Alert) Communications.

The event, titled “Service Brokers: Exploring the Next Generation Application to Network Connectivity Alternative,” explored a number of subjects, including service broker architecture, features and functionality. The speakers also walked attendees through several real deployment scenarios to give them a better understanding as it how these solutions can streamline processes for communication service providers, system integrators and ISVs.

“A service broker is able to iron out many of the kinks in the operator’s service delivery infrastructure by enabling them to homogenize what is now essentially a heterogeneous network segregated into incompatible and proprietary segments,” said McGarvey.

Telecom innovators that use service brokers are able efficiently manage service interaction and network orchestration.

Beecher Tuttle is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. He received his bachelor's degree in English from the University of Colorado.

Edited by Beecher Tuttle