810q

The liberalization of telecom markets across the world has exposed service providers to a high level of competition. This
requires them to reduce costs, improve customer service and rapidly introduce new services. One important way in which
these pressures can be addressed is through improved integration of the many software systems operated by a service
provider. This includes amongst others, the integration of different operation support systems. Component based reuse is
seen as an increasingly important software development aid, both within the telecom industry and in the wider IT community.
Building systems from components that interact through well defined interfaces offer a route for reusing software across
projects within a telecom system developer and to integrate commodity third party software into the system. Both of these
offer development cost savings and improvements in reliability and maintainability. Emerging standards such as Enterprise
JavaBeans and CORBA Components are encouraging the development of platforms that directly support component integration.
This is prompting the telecom industry to move towards the widespread adoption of component-based architecture and
design.
Certain business factors drive requirements for revolutionary integration. For telecommunications service providers, these
include reductions in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and time-to-market new services, both of which provide a competitive
advantage through improved cash flows.
Factors that influence TCO fall in two categories: 1) cost of building the solution and 2) cost of operations and maintenance.
The first cost is tied to the time and effort required to build, test, and configure the solution, which is influenced by solution
modeling approaches and the availability of appropriate tools.
Many factors influence operations and maintenance costs. These include the effort to integrate new applications, the effort
to implement changes in process definition and messaging requirements, the ease of configuring, monitoring and
troubleshooting, and so on. The solution should also be future-proof relatively insensitive to technology changes. Choosing
the right solution architecture can significantly reduce both these costs. The history of information technology points to
more sophisticated solutions using higher levels of abstraction. Higher levels of abstraction lets you focus on the essential
features of the problem. One way to do this is to use the right models. The remainder of this article presents a solution
architecture that addresses the business imperatives mentioned above. The solution described here is based on the Next-
Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) initiative from the Tele Management Forum (TMF) [3]. Another initiative
that addresses the Implementation issues is OSS/J [4] initiative from SUN.