Combining Telco Services: The Network Service Broker Opportunity

It has become clear that there is a need to find a way to speed up the process for new services and delivery. Operators have recognized they need to reuse services in order to accomplish this. These same operators are interested in new service creation and delivery architectures that support the assembly of telecom products from reusable service components. This has been part of the rationale for investments in session description protocols (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS). One of the first problems operators face in trying to understand what they need to accelerate the creation and delivery of telecom products from reusable service components and how different vendors’ products can help them, is the confusing range of terms in this area. Many terms are used fairly interchangeably to describe technology. It is important for operators and vendors to understand the differences between the technologies in order to effectively create new products. Vendors suggest that successful services that begin life as mash-ups may be re-implemented using service brokering technology for performance, maintenance, and scaleability purposes. Service brokering is an alternative approach to mash-ups for building services (products) from combinations of other services/products, and network service brokering can accommodate network protocol latencies and other carrier-grade concerns while supporting fast and flexible product assembly. Vendors and standards bodies should work toward an agreed and adopted definition of the Service Capability Interaction Manager (SCIM), unambiguous roles for applications, and a standard way of expressing service interactions between network and the IT/Web services broker domain. Since inter-domain interactions are supported by non-standard interaction scripting languages and interfaces, operators should recognize that there will be a trade-off between becoming locked into a network service broker vendor’s proprietary, combinatorial service interaction environment, and the flexibility and richness of the interactions they will be able to orchestrate between any IT and/or network application. This report examines current definitions of the service broker and the way service brokering differs from the IT paradigm of service orchestration. It discusses various approaches to service brokering at different levels of the network architecture and how these can be mapped onto vendor products at this stage in the market. Finally, this report also examines future trends for service brokering versus service orchestration and discusses the relationship between service brokering and “mash-ups” in the Web 2.0 domain. Combining Telco Services: The Network Service Broker Opportunity provides critical insight and analysis for a range of industry participants, including: Operators who are interested in new service creation and delivery architectures that support the assembly of telecom products from reusable service components Network service broker vendors needing independent analysis of the market opportunity for their technologies, and the likely pace of adoption Investors seeking guidance on the size of the market opportunity for suppliers in the network service broker segment, and on the likely market leaders in this emerging sector