What the project will achieve

Creating the marketplace for the next generation of services requires participation from not only Service Providers, but content owners, aggregators and others who possess something valuable to customers.

To become a powerful player in this market place, each stakeholder must have the capability to rapidly assemble and re-assemble new services. To that end, the TM Forum’s Service Delivery Framework (SDF) has evolved to support service lifecycle management.

Successful delivery of the end service to customer requires also business agreements and common understanding of how to expose services and what kind of data must flow from one Service Provider to another.

A simple example of service syndication in this approach is the following:

• A conferencing service is exposed by Service Provider A to be syndicated under three contracts: small, medium and large conference
• A real time video session delivery is exposed by Service Provider B to be syndicated under two contracts: slideware presentation and animated presentation
• A common billing service is exposed by Service Provider C to be syndicated under one contract: detailed charging
• A service aggregator will contract an animated video presentation for a small conference with detailed charging. The service aggregator has the capability to capture events/information related to the health and usage of services provided by SP A and SP B before using SP C for invoicing the end user.”

Why it needs to be done

Service syndication (aka value-chain for composite services) is becoming a hot-topic within the industry, but few people know how to make it work. The current work of the SDF workgroup and the PSA specification apply directly to this new area and will be used extensively throughout the catalyst. We will experiment service and product assembly, order entry and service provisioning across the border of service providers. The catalyst will also focus on end-to-end service management by targeting an SQM use case that depicts event generation and subscription technologies. A new concept for manageable services from Microsoft will also be introduced as an enabling technology for end-to-end service quality management.

The potential benefit to the industry

The industry will see for the first time how SDF could be implemented within a Catalyst. Service syndication is discussed but technical requirements and vision have yet to be covered. Finally, Microsoft’s IP contribution towards ‘well-enabled services’ will help solidify standards-based semantics for events related to service management.

The timescale

We will present the first phase (end-to-end product assembly, provisioning and SQM) of this project in Nice

A second phase regarding settlements, billing and revenue allocation could be done in the second half of the year.