Service Delivery Broker on Windows Azure
Microsoft, Portugal Telecom SAPO, and Telcordia will collaborate to take the TM Forum Service Delivery Broker catalyst project to the next level at Management World 2011 in Dublin during May. The PT SAPO SDB has been in production for five years at Portugal Telecom deployed on Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server in a Private Cloud configuration. Last year for this project, the SDB was also migrated to Windows Azure – a process that took four people only two months to complete. The SDB is now available deployed in a Microsoft private cloud, Windows Azure, or in a hybrid cloud configuration.
Over the past five years, Portugal Telecom SAPO has been developing and refining its strategy for a common platform to govern the creation or exposure of services by developers and delivery of products via marketplaces. PT SAPO recognized early on that a key requirement was a solution that could manage the process of exposing or creating individual services and model service composition supported by a governance system that enforced a practical set of best practices for Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures.
The resulting Service Delivery Broker (SDB) evolved as a Web Services control layer that could efficiently handle common tasks and mediate access to resources within various underlying domains including the telecom IMS layer. The SDB needed to to this in a consistent manner across the enterprise, the telecom network, and multiple clouds. It needed to support the needs of any device, any programming language, any business model (B2C or B2B).
PT SAPO was keen to enable new advertising and subscription revenues by enabling a two-way Web 2.0 revenue models. The PT SAPO SDB evolved to expose web, enterprise applications such as BSS/OSS, and network services to its own developers. SAPO project leader Antonio Cruz says: “These include mobile applications, our Mediaroom internet protocol television (IPTV) framework, Web services, and enterprise applications for businesses”.
Telcordia will contribute to the catalyst by exposing elements of its Service Delivery and Charging Suite providing Telecom Application Server (TAS), Real Time Charging (RTC), and Policy (RTP) capabilities to the PT SAPO SDB layer. In addition, Telcordia will leverage their Dynamic Catalog (DCAT) BSS product by exposing and coordinating its capabilities at the PT SAPO SDB layer.
This hybrid service delivery solution helps internal and external developers be more productive by guiding all participants in the system through a ITIL v3 based service delivery lifecycle process. The runtime environment greatly benefits from this structure. Experience to date indicates this service delivery governance model is enabling Portugal Telecom business groups and an external 3rd party developer ecosystem to accelerate launches of new services via a 50% + reduction of time and cost.