TMCnet’s Service Broker Forum is intended to serve as a resource for companies seeking to accelerate new service creation and delivery of telecom products from reusable service components in both IN (Intelligent Networks) and NGN (Next-Generation Intelligent Networks).

The Service Broker Forum itself is a multi-vendor association with the goal of evangelizing and educating the telecommunication industry on the service broker product category through the sharing of ideas, opinions, and knowledge. Founded by industry leaders in the Service Broker market space, the forum provides a common platform to facilitate discussion and communication around the many benefits that can be realized from utilizing Service Brokers within an overall network evolution strategy. Membership in the Forum is open to those vendors, system integrators, service providers and application developers that are interested in embracing the product category and committed to evangelizing the benefits of Service Broker solutions the Service Broker Forum.

Why Was the Forum Created?

The telecom market is ever changing and increasing in complexity in its service requirements, and operators benefit from the development of flexible, efficient and future proof-applications to network connectivity solution. The new Service Broker Forum was created to help accelerate the awareness and understanding of the Service Broker product category and help the market take better advantage of the time, cost and overall network efficiencies within the solutions.

Members of the Service Broker Forum currently include innovative companies such as Amdocs/jNetx, Metaswitch, OpenCloud and Oracle (News - Alert).

So What Do Service Brokers Do?

The U.S. has a wide mix of telecom operators. Some are relatively new, and some – in one incarnation or another – have been around over a hundred years. During that time, most of these operators have built out new, often competing networks with each generation of new services they have launched. As a result, most carriers are juggling multiple service delivery infrastructures: essentially individual (and often incompatible) vertical networks such as IN (Intelligent Networks), NGN (Next-Generation Intelligent Networks) and even IMS (IP Media Subsystem), all offering a dedicated sets of services. Today’s operators are finding it difficult to offer new services to all subscribers, since it means they have to replicate the service many times over on their multiple networks.

As telecom services being offered to subscribers become more complex and operators must increasingly juggle both new services and these existing vertical networks, there has arisen a need for someone to help cut through all the complexity and help operators deliver new, innovative services.

Writes analyst Joe McGarvey of Current Analysis, “Negotiating the labyrinth of protocols and service domains in order to introduce a new service have robbed operators of the agility and efficiency required to compete with Internet counterparts, which have attracted legions of developers to their open, consistent and universally accessible platforms. With the option of starting from scratch with a brand new network out of the question, operators are instead beginning to turn to a sort of bridging technology that is designed to homogenize operator networks by creating a bond of commonality between a carrier’s various network and services layers.”

This is where the service brokers come in. Service brokers reside between the service layer and the converging network and is traditionally decoupled from the core switch and the service execution or service creation environment. Typically, the provide the following key functions:

·         SCIM

·         IM-SSF

·         IN-IN Trigger Management

·         Protocol/Call Flow Management

·         Subscriber Data Management Interaction

Essentially, they help extends new and existing applications while also interacting with data services management such as subscriber data, policy management elements, and provide an innovative alternative for protecting and leveraging an operator’s current network assets and application investments while also introducing new services over Next-Generation Networks (NGNs).