Service Delivery Platform - History

History

The late 1990s saw a period of unprecedented change in enterprise applications as the grip of client-server architectures gradually relaxed and allowed the entrance of n-tiered architectures. This represented the advent of the application server, a flexible compromise between the absolutes of the dumb terminal and the logic-heavy client PC. Although entrants into the application server ring were many and varied, they shared common advantages: database vendor abstraction, open standard (mostly object-oriented) programming models, high availability and scalability characteristics, and presentation frameworks, among others. These transformations were triggered by business forces including the rampaging tidal wave that was the Internet boom, but none of it would have been possible without the proliferation of standards such as the TCP/IP protocol, the Java programming language, and the Java EE web application server architecture. It is against this backdrop of transformation that telecom's era of rapid change was set in motion.

Up until the first few years of 2000, the markets for commercial and business telecommunication technologies were still saturated with proprietary hardware and software. Open standards started to become popular as IP technologies were introduced and with the rapid expansion of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) for transmission of voice data over packet networks and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for standardized media control, especially regarding enterprise voice communication.

In this new standards-supported environment, convergence of the voice and data worlds has become less a moniker for disastrous telecom/IT integration attempts and more a true avenue for the production of new and better consumer and business services. The last few years have seen the introduction or proliferation of various SIP programming libraries (reSIProcate, Aricent, MjSip and its derived port by HSC) and products based on the relatively new SIP standard, and the IP Multimedia Subsystem standard defined by the 3GPP has gained a huge following. The Service Delivery Platform, whose power comes in large part from the quality and acceptance of these supporting standards, is rapidly gaining acceptance as a widely applicable architectural pattern.

In industry today multiple definitions of Service Delivery Platform (SDP) are used with no established consensus as to a common meaning. Because of this, and the need for service providers to understand how to better manage SDPs, the TM Forum (TMF) has started standardizing the concept of Service Delivery Framework (SDF) and SDF management. The SDF definition provides the terminology and concepts needed to reference the various components involved, such as applications and enablers, network and service exposure, and orchestration.

What is needed to deliver a blend of personalized services from multiple SDPs to end users is a means to inter-work those SDPs through common service enablers and network resources. Underpinning these service aspects though has been a fundamental concept that the user's attributes and the services they receive require a common repository and a common data model, such as those provided by a LDAP/X.500 directory or HSS database. Early SDP implementations of this nature started in the mid / late 1990s for ISP converged services. Larger and more complex SDPs have been implemented over the last 5 years in MSO type environments and for mobile operators.

SDPs: Their Context and Next Generation Systems

SDPs are commonly considered for the telco type environments as a core system which interconnects the customer's access and network infrastructure with the OSS systems and BSS systems. SDPs in this context are usually associated to a particular service regime such as mobile telephones or for converged services.

SDPs are also considered in the context of very large transformation, convergence and integration programs which require a considerable budget. The difficulty in such projects is that there may be hundreds of thousands of design and implementation decisions to be made - once the architecture is agreed. Naturally this issue alone dictates the need for software development and operational engineering skills. Probably the best way of reducing these design and integration issues is to simulate the SDP on a small scale system before the major project actually starts. This allows the solution architecture to be verified that it meets the operational, service delivery and business requirements.

In the new world of converged service delivery, SDPs should also be considered not just as a core function within an operator but as a number of interconnected, distributed service nodes (e.g.) for redundancy reasons and for different service profiles to different business and market sectors. Many operators provide commercial scale/grade products such as bundled voice, web hosting, VPNs, mail, conference and messaging facilities to government and corporate clients. The evolution of such bundled services could be from fragmented management systems to a "Virtual Private Service Environment" where the operator runs a dedicated SDP for each of its customers who require their services on demand and under their control.

SDPs can also be used to manage independent wireless enabled precincts such as shopping malls, airports, retirement villages, outcare centres. In this case a "lightweight" easy to deploy platform could be used. See wwite: Next Generation Governance and Service Delivery Platform.