Telecom is a growing multi-million dollar industry that is only going to continue to expand with the need for telecommunication services. In today’s active and ever changing market, operators are looking for ways to speed up the process of new service creation and the delivery of telecom products from reusable service components. With the constant advancements and demand for telecom services, it becomes necessary for mediators to step in make the process go as smooth as possible.

As a result, over the past couple of years, the Service Broker product category has developed due to the broadening 3GPP discussion around SCIM and the need to address operator’s requirements for a flexible, efficient and future-proof application to network solution. The purpose of the Service Broker Forum is to raise awareness of the Service Broker product category and to help the market take full advantage of the time, cost and overall network efficiencies within the solution.

Service brokers are defined as a network element that efficiently manages service interaction and service composition. Service Brokers are located between the service layer and the converging network and are traditionally decoupled from the core switch and the service execution or service creation environment.

The introduction of a Service Broker significantly lessens the resources and time required to bring new services to market when compared to the traditional application to network interworking and connectivity alternatives. By doing so operators are able to easily leverage the most popular and by no coincidence most critical revenue generating telecom services and applications.

According to the Service Broker Forum there are many key benefits to having a service broker. A service broker provides a future-proof solution for ongoing efficient application to network deployment, while extending new and existing application reach while also interacting with data services management such as subscriber data, policy management elements. Service brokers also provide an innovative alternative for protecting and leveraging an operator’s current network assets and application investments while also introducing new services over NGNs.