OMG Telecom Information Day

OMG Technical Meeting - Washington, DC USA

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Agenda

08:30-09:00 Welcome and Overview of the Day
Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman & CEO, Object Management Group

09:00-09:30 Applying OMG Technology and Expertise to Telecommunications
Fred Waskiewicz, Director of Standards, Object Management Group

OMG develops its technical specifications with business in mind. Drawing upon member expertise in modeling, BPM, middleware, and automated service specifications, OMG is producing the standards foundation for tools that can assist the telecommunications industry in meeting the challenges of a fast-paced and ever-changing business environment. While applicable OMG specifications will be briefly described, it is not the intent of this talk to serve as a lecture on those specifications. Rather, they are being offered as evidence of OMG's role in aiding the telecommunications industry is designing interoperability and agility into its business systems.

09:30-10:15 SOA for Telecom or Not?
Hanane Becha, Standards Advisor, Nortel

The telecom industry is facing new business challenges in a hyper-competitive and hyper-connected world, along with increasing expectations from customers and partners. With recent technological advances in the nature of telecom services (VoIP, IPTV and WiMAX, etc.) the telecom market has come a long way from its roots in voice services. Communication is changing the nature of nearly every significant application, leveraging the unique capabilities of communications infrastructures to deliver agility to business processes. The convergence of IT and telecommunications to offer Communication enabled applications and new types of services cannot rely on monolithic architectural approaches.
SOA has become the most popular software architecture and emerged as the premier integration framework for complex and heterogeneous enterprise systems. Can a SOA framework also be the solution to overcome today's telecom challenges? What adaptations will SOA need for the specific requirements of telecommunications? What are the limitations of IT-centric SOA technologies when applied to the telecoms domain?

10:15-10:30 Morning Refreshments

10:30-11:20 SPICE: Service Platform for Innovative Communication Environment
Mariano Belaunde, Research Engineer, France Telecom

This project is researching, prototyping and evaluating an extendable overlay architecture and framework to support, easy and quick service creation, test and deployment of intelligent mobile communication and information services. Building on significant advances in IT technologies, the SPICE platform supports multiple heterogeneous execution platforms allowing for new, innovative services to be spread across different operator domains and over different countries realizing a variety of business models.
For users, operators and service providers, the SPICE project has the ambition to turn today's confusing heterogeneity into an easily manageable and rich service environment by exploiting the diversity of device capabilities and fostering service adoption. The SPICE approach will broaden business opportunities in the communications and associated business sectors.
To achieve this ambition, the SPICE consortium integrates the competence and knowledge of leading European telecom operators/service providers and key IT and telecommunications suppliers. The SPICE project is part of the Wireless World Initiative (WWI).

11:20-12:00 OASIS Telecom Work
Paul Knight, Standards Advisor, Nortel

This presentation will describe some of the work of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) that is particularly relevant to Telecommunications, especially the intersection of SOA-related specifications with Telecommunications. From the SOA Reference Model to the six specifications under development in the Open Composite Services Architecture umbrella, and on to the brand-new Telecommunications Services Member Section, OASIS is addressing a number of areas that will be of interest to the OMG Telecom Information Day attendees. This presentation will also discuss approaches for supportive interaction between OASIS and the revitalized OMG Telecom Task Force.

12:00-14:00 OMG Lunch and Plenary Session

14:00-14:40 SOA as End to End OSS/BSS/SDP Solution in a Box for Telcos
Dr. Stéphane H. Maes, CTO & Chief Architect, Oracle, Mobile, Voice and Communications

The talk describes how SOA and IT technologies provide a suitable basic infrastructure and blueprint for a run time service delivery platform (SDP) designed for telcos and based on the work done at OMA (Open Mobile Alliance). Such a SDP supports truly converged applications that can coexist both on NGNs (e.g. internet and IMS) and legacy networks. The same SOA infrastructure can then be applied to integrate end to end the SDP with the OSS and BSS and support the execution of typical Telco service provider business processes, like end to end life cycle management of services (e.g. concept to cash, trouble to resolve etc...) and other eTom flows. The resulting end to end integration of OSS, BSS and SDP/Run time illustrates how it is becoming possible with SOA to provide an end to end "Telco in a box" offering that encompasses a complete standard-based OSS, BSS and SDP solution as well as the supporting end to end business processes. We then discuss suitability and options for greenfield operators, virtual operators and established operators.

14:40-15:20     TM Forum: MDA Role in Service Delivery Framework (SDF)
                      Jenny Huang, Strategic Standards Manager, AT&T
                      Francesco Caruso, Director of Enterprise Integration Research, Telcordia Technologies

The Next Generation Network and Services (NGN/NGS) will provide an environment for convergence of many forms of service which have traditionally been provided from a variety of industry sectors, such as Telecom, IT, Media, Entertainment etc. It is important to recognize the main business drivers behind NGN and NGS, whilst the convergence of transport technologies towards a common IP-based approach will bring many cost saving advantages, the bigger value of NGN will be delivered through the very rapid and flexible delivery of NGN Services. It is for the above reason, the TM Forum has commenced work on a SDF (Service Delivery Framework) program to enable this much wider mix and blending together of service components with an agile process. This presentation provides an overview of the TM Forum SDF program and how SOA and MDA technologies will be applied.

15:20-15:35 Afternoon Refreshments

15:35-16:00     Leveraging the CORBA Legacy in the Adoption of QoS-enabled SOA for Telecom OSS
                      Practical Systems Evolution in a Cost-conscious World
                      Doug Schmidt, CTO, PrismTech

Standards save money for users and provide larger markets for vendors. However the adoption of new standards must always be considered in the light of preserving the value in past investments, mitigating integration and new technology costs, and the maintenance and evolution of heterogeneous systems. This presentation from PrismTech will focus on the practical issues related to leveraging the CORBA legacy in the adoption of QoS-enabled SOA. The continued advance of CORBA (e.g. smaller/faster implementations, opensource, COS, SaaS) combined with new OMG standards and implementations (e.g. SOA SIG/Consortium, MDA, RT pub/sub middleware) provide technical and commercial enablers for QoS-enabled SOA. This presentation will discuss these enablers in a technical context and also touch on migration/evolution strategies to help deploy QoS-enabled SOA at affordable cost.

16:00-16:25 UML Extensions for SOA Modeling
Jim Amsden, Senior Technical Staff Member, Solution Architect, IBM

Models of computing have evolved over the years from functional decomposition, abstract data types, object-oriented programming and component modeling. Each evolution has provided better ways of managing cohesion and coupling to enable more agile solutions. Service-Oriented architectures represent the next step in this evolution and address situations where interactions between consumers and providers cross ownership boundaries. UML2.1 has a number of rich component and event modeling capabilities. However, it is missing some important capabilities necessary for SOA modeling. This presentation will provide an overview of the current status of the UML Profile and Metamodel for Services and will discuss the UML extensions for services modeling.

16:25-17:00 Wrap-up Panel:

      - What is missing to make SOA meets the challenges of the telecom industry
      - How OMG can help
      - Work on Telecom Group charter
      - Discuss the Telco group short and long term goals

      Panelists:   Mariano Belaunde, Research Engineer, France Telecom
                        Hanane Becha, Standards Advisor, Nortel
                        Jenny Huang, Strategic Standards Manager, AT&T
                        Stéphane H. Maes, CTO & Chief Architect, Oracle, Mobile, Voice and Communications