Service Delivery Platform - Relationship To SOA

Relationship To SOA

Much has been made in recent years of the Service-oriented architecture (SOA) concept. Discussions that once centered on Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies and concepts have shifted into the SOA domain, favoring ideas like service composition over simple message adaptation and extract, transform, and load techniques.

SOAs can be used as an application integration technology within an SDP but are best served when used in the lower performance functions such as connections between the transactional OSS and BSS applications and the SDP. SOAs need careful consideration if they are to meet the real time demands placed on the SDP by the converged event type services.

An analogue concept to SDP found in the realm of SOA is that of Web Service Ecosystem (also known as Web Service Marketplace) and the SaaS platform. A Web Service Ecosystem is a hosted environment in which participants expose their services using common Web technologies such as HTTP, XML, SOAP and REST. This hosted environment provides a number of service delivery components covering aspects such as authentication, identity management, usage metering and analytics, content adaptation, data format conversion, charging and payment. This enables service providers to focus on their core functionality and to outsource the service delivery to third parties. Services deployed over Web Service Ecosystems may be business-critical, but they typically do not have the real-time and high-performance requirements associated to telecommunications services for which SDPs are traditionally conceived. They usually support common business functions such as quoting, order management, marketing campaign management or customer care. SOA can also be used to standardize operational processes and re-use them across SDPs.