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Service Broking and SOA

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TMCnews Featured Article


January 07, 2011

Service Broking and SOA

By TMCnet Special Guest
Jonathan Bell, OpenCloud


Peter, Joe, Brett and Matt are the best of friends. Not the casual acquaintances that go by the name ‘friends’ in the social networking sense, but genuine buddies. They grew up together, went to school together, went to college but stayed in close contact during the vacations and then started their careers – they remained in close and enduring contact through thick and thin. It’s a common enough situation, one that has been played out through the ages. But times they are a changing, as they say and communication between friends is now undertaken via a plethora of media. 


Kids play online interactive games against remote players whilst talking to one another (locally or remotely) and at the same time, they will commonly be running several instant messaging (IM) conversations. Worryingly, it’s the same when they’re on the computer doing their homework. When they get off the school bus, having just ridden home doing the usual chatting, bag hiding, associated rumpus and so on that we all did, they will immediately get online via their mobile phone using SMS and IM to continue the communication.

So Brett, Matt and company have taken communication to a whole different level. They use the web and they use the telephone. Usually, it’s a cell phone – a smartphone. 

What does the mobile telecom operator do to support Brett, Matt and Co. and their communication-centric lifestyle? Is it “business as usual”? Should they just provide the basic means of connectivity and then leave them to choose which mechanism and when? Or can they provide more by merging the power and usability of the smartphone with the network capabilities? Enriching the communication so that it supports them so thoroughly and comprehensively that is becomes the very fabric of their lives?

Brett, Matt and Co. all subscribe to the “Amigo Intimo” service. This provides them with a closed, small-group telecom social network – a trusted relationship group. It provides a range of social group-aware telecommunication services for use within the group. 

Amigo Intimo allows the social group to agree to share personal presence, diary and location information. It provides a shared, visual address book that is dynamic and changes as they travel around, as they undertake various activities and as they work through their diary schedule.

When they agree to meet at the football game, they can see each others progress to the match on a map on their handset. They can find each other and meet at the entrance to the East stand to collect their tickets from Matt. They get a “short queue” alert for the nearest bar in the East stand with a short (well, shortish) line. Joe couldn’t make it due to a late work commitment, but they are still able to ensure he sees the key moments and perhaps delight in a little friendly schadenfreude. 

Fantasy? It need not be. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have been a popular way of making blocks of functionality and data available to other Web and IT systems in a loosely coupled way for many years. Now, SOAs are finding application inside the telecom network, even inside the call, video or message delivery control path. Telecom Service Brokers can participate in an SOA in either of two ways: as a consumer of services and also as a provider of services.

As a consumer, a Telecom Service Broker can invoke an external SOA service within a Service Composition. For example, if Pete receives but fails to answer a call, the Service Broker can determine the cell ID. It could use an SOA to access a more exact geo-location, and then make this information available to the trusted group, for display on their map. Another example is accessing the availability information for the trusted group from a shared diary located on an external system.

On the provider side, Telecom Service Brokers and Application Servers can package blocks of network functionality or dynamic data and make it available as SOA services for use by external systems. For example, some network data changes frequently or often, in real-time and for the service to be truly useful, this information must be accessed and used rather than an external copy that is not up to date.

A new generation of converged web/ telecom service providers is actively developing the types of service – explicit or inferred – that are in the Brett, Matt and Co. example, usually as over-the-top services. In many ways, the Telecom Operator is a much better position to do this as they have the network and Telecom Service Brokers provide the means to add functionality to basic services using SOAs and hence deliver a higher value, personalized service.


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Edited by Stefanie Mosca







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