‘SOA’ comes calling on telephone industry

The line between IT and telephony is blurring. Industry observers say it will soon disappear, now that service oriented architecture (SOA) is spreading into telecommunications. The concept of creating an infinitely interoperable systems utopia based on universal standards is turning into an irresistible force. SOA is coming - and it will have a profound impact on enterprise telephony and telecom organizations.SOA chain reactionsThe fundamental design principles of SOA focus on creating loosely-coupled, interoperable modular interfaces for services based on common standards that aren't tied to any platform or programming language. Web services, which are based on open XML standards, are emerging as a popular form of SOA application programming interface (API).On the enterprise IT front, putting new SOA wrappers on old proprietary applications means services can be shared, linked, reused and recombined as needed internally and extended externally to the Web. SOA is gaining serious traction in the enterprise systems integration realm: about 70% of US companies say they plan to invest in it over the next two years and 40% of Canadian companies say the same, according to research from IDC Canada Ltd.But SOA is starting to spill out of enterprise IT into other areas. "Having a wrapper that speaks HTML has really useful applications in a broad range of fields: physics, biology, everything's being represented as Web services," says Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of advanced networks at Ottawa-based CANARIE. "Whether it's a traditional payroll application or radio telescope research, it makes sharing, mapping and transferring data, and creating new mash-ups, simple."These are still early days on the telecom side, but he points out the CTOs of major US carriers were earnestly discussing SOA and Web 2.0 at a recent conference in Chicago. "They are making intense efforts to move in this direction," says St. Arnaud. And communications equipment providers such as Cisco Systems Inc., Avaya Inc. and Nortel Networks are moving aggressively, unveiling SOA-enabled gear for both enterprise and telco customers. Let's consider this software concept as it pertains to operations inside and outside of corporations.Inside: enterprise telephonySOA is an umbrella architecture that's moving from IT to cover telecom as well, says Gary Audin, president of Delphi Inc., an Arlington VA-based network consultancy. As in other IT areas, enterprise communications systems are structured as silos, typically comprising separate servers for VoIP, email, and other services."SOA brings all those together on a single screen that lets you move between them as though they were all resident at one location," he says. "It helps create unified communications but lets you leave telephony systems where they are."The use of Web services to create interfaces that integrate telephony will have a major impact, he says. Web services coding skills are already common, so specialized skills won't be needed to create them. "Someone who knows nothing about telephony can write an app that pops up on a cellphone screen."While SOA isn't strictly required to create unified communications, it makes it easier, and lays the foundation for integrated communications services linked with non-communications services, he says. For example, a HR manager conducting a voice call and Web conference might look up a person's record on HR systems, and then click on it to call the person to join the discussion.SOA potentially breaks down the barriers between telecom and IT. "Telecom is a member of the SOA environment," says Audin. "What this means is that telecom will eventually become just another IT function working on a group of servers."This will bring major organizational and cultural mind-shifts, he says. There is more involved than simply merging two organizational areas once telecom rides on the same IP network as data. "People who assume it won't have a major impact on them are wrong," he says.Still, SOA brings up one of the classic concerns about convergence: worlds colliding.Performance is completely different for voice versus data, Audin explains. "What data users will tolerate is intolerable for voice users. If you have a lousy data network, things may get slow but text and images on screens retain their accuracy. Not so with voice - if it's garbled, it changes the accuracy." And once unified communications are in place, users will expect data to work at the same speed as voice, he adds.Budgets and economic models are also different, he says. IT staff are accustomed to being charged flat fees for data communications services. "If services are over-used, you get performance degradation but the bill doesn't go up." Conversely, voice has a message-usage model, which means the bill goes up when there's more traffic but performance remains the same. "Most CIOs aren't used to dealing with usage-sensitive pricing, and are inexperienced at dealing with carrier contracts."In addition, many issues that never affected telephony when it was separate from IT will apply, he says. "Once systems are connected with SOA, telephony devices will have access to many IT systems in real-time. Telecom will need to be compliant with regulations it was immune from in the past." Unified communications systems may need be audited to ensure they comply with corporate governance rules, privacy, e-discovery and other regulations. And security may need to be re-thought, as IT people aren't accustomed to dealing with toll-fraud and other voice-related issues. These are all anticipated changes, not theoretical changes, says Audin. The trend is clearly towards merging the two areas eventually. To understand the impact, telecom people need to educate themselves about SOA principles and implementation strategies. "They need to find out what the IT people intend to do with SOA over the next five years," he says.Outside: Telecom carriersAs with other enterprises, telecom carriers are looking to SOA to unify their back- office operations support systems (OSS), says St. Arnaud. The customer connection order processes for wireline, cellphone and other business lines run on different proprietary systems, and are all done in different and complicated ways. Most major carriers are involved in SOA projects to develop common processes and services that can be reused across business lines, he says.But many are waking up to the fact that Web services can be used to automate customer ordering processes between organizations, he says. Enterprise customers are also implementing SOA, so transactions that require human back-and-forth can be automated as Web services, which can in turn invoke other Web services, and then others, throughout the service chain."If GM orders a phone line from Bell Canada, it has to be validated, checked, tested, delivered, and invoiced by many people," says St. Arnaud. Instead, all the specialized steps in the transactions can be itemized, agreed to in a contract, and automated as interlinking Web services between both companies.SOA started internally at carriers to share commonalities, but the push to use it for external interoperability will have far-ranging impact. "Avaya started this by developing Web services to make it easy for the Bells to buy equipment from it." Cisco and Nortel are also active in this space, offering SOA-enabled network equipment. "With this gear, the OSS systems can talk to network and other devices to set up services for customers and monitor them," says St. Arnaud. "All the major equipment manufacturers are going this way. Their equipment is starting to talk to each other in Web services."Big systems integration firms such as IBM Corp. and EDS Corp. are eyeing the enormous potential in this, he says. "One of their biggest problems is getting the circuits they buy from different carriers to cross-connect. Now they can go to the marketplace and buy circuits, storage and other technology, integrate it themselves and resell them. So if an IBM customer wants a data processing service, that request is represented as Web services to IBM, then fed to Bell, then Cisco, and so on."St. Arnaud believes this trend will disintermediate carriers and force them to change their business models. "Carriers see where this is going and it's scaring them." At first blush, Web services are great for them, as it allows them to reduce their back-end costs while keeping prices the same. "But they're starting to realize if customers have Web services too, there's no reason for them to go to their central systems for services."Nimble new companies such as Level 3 Communications Inc. that don't have all the legacy system baggage and unionized labour overhead of established carriers can implement SOA more easily and undercut them in pricing. "Instead of the traditional way, where carriers charge customers for every connection, Level 3 may instead charge a flat monthly fee for new services. This puts intense competitive pressure on carriers."SOA speed bumpsThere are tantalizing opportunities in SOA, but there are also some industry-wide issues. "There's no universally accepted definition, so it's different from one industry to the next," says Michael Kuhbock, CEO of the Calgary-based Integration Consortium, a vendor-neutral industry association. "Everybody has different reasons for being active in this space, be they producers or consumers of solutions, so it's hard to get consensus."As a consequence, the number of SOA standards is rapidly proliferating. "There are standards wars going on," says St. Arnaud. "Web services have exploded into a multitude of different variations and special sector types. Now suddenly, this great nirvana solution that could make everything compatible has itself become incompatible with different versions."Vendors feed this confusion by branding their particular product or flavour around their own definitions, says Kuhbock. Cisco, for example, has put its own spin on SOA with its service oriented network architecture (SONA). "It's open and closed at the same time," explains St. Arnaud. "At a basic level, it will talk with other companies' SOA, but if you want a special feature, then you have to use Cisco's custom version of SOA, which doesn't work with anything else. It's a marketing game."Audin agrees many vendors are selling hype. "Most of them are selling concepts and some pieces of tools. And one thing I haven't heard anything about is SOA management platforms - a central brain - to manage the entire structure." Since SOA is an architecture, the real challenges for organizations lie in developing strategies for unifying communications infrastructure, he says. "Now we have to think about tying communications systems logically, not physically."

‘SOA’ comes calling on telephone industry

News | July 12, 2007

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