SmartSDB

TM Forum

Service Delivery Broker Phase II Catalyst Project

Portugal Telecom is the largest telecommunications service provider in Portugal with a significant presence in the international market, e.g. Brazil, Angola and Namibia.

For Management World 2011 in Dublin this May, Portugal Telecom's subsidiary, SAPO, is providing the requirements for and demonstrating the Service Delivery Broker Catalyst Project, which started at Management World Americas 2010.

The Catalyst project for Dublin seeks to put into practice, test and refine some of the core concepts of TM Forum's Software Enabled Services Management Solution (SES) and the associated specifications for Service Management Interfaces (SMI).

Service Delivery Broker Catalyst Phase II is focused on the user experience for the Service Designer and Product Manager roles through service and product lifecycles. In a wizard-like interface, a product Manager will be able to easily take any Web service API from the Catalog, configure it according to a given charging model and see it published in a worldwide marketplace.

Other aspects that will be enhanced in the second phase include:

• Product/Service Developer Support Application for managing the service and product lifecycle in alignment with the best practices of the Software Enabled Services Management project in TM Forum;
• Runtime Services Broker Middleware that provides certain reusable elements such as security, data formatting, data model transformations, protocol bridging, intermediate routing and policy centralization, among several other service-orientation design patterns;
• Standards that facilitate exposure of network, enterprise and web services that can be leveraged by the product developer and invoked by the Service Delivery Broker at Runtime.

In order to ensure both on-demand scalability and high availability while minimizing investment risks, the solution will be deployed on the Windows Azure platform. Besides the core Management Services, the project will deliver real-time metrics based on services SLA/OLA.

There are momentum and business opportunities for projects focusing on minimizing operational costs while ensuring the best quality and performance. Business opportunities to monetize the solution and its services can be:

• Cloud Service Providers interested in practical experience and best practices implementing Service Delivery Framework concepts within their own hosted service offerings;
• Architects interested in gaining a better perspective on architectural approaches and knowing more details about architectural decisions;
• Service Designers interested in the unified user interface and how to implement prescriptive guidance for service templates;
• Managers concerned about implementing new business models and opportunities;
• Operations groups interested in real-time statistics and reports that finally permit visibility into what drives satisfaction and operational expenses;
• Access and usage of the Service Lifecycle Management Services, Notifications and Broker services (authentication, routing, transformations, validation, caching, market, etc.) ;
• Content and Network Services access both in a time period and/or a per request model (e.g. 50,000 or 5 million);
• Detailed KPIs and/or a predictive/trend analysis of services revenue, state and usage.

 

Source: http://www.tmforum.org/CollaborationinAction/10450/home.html