Wally Beck, Senior Director of Marketing, AppTrigger Inc.

By now, many of you may have heard the recent buzz around the growing momentum within the service broker market. Service broker solutions have emerged as a result of service providers exploring new innovative ways to manage their application connectivity, application to network interaction and application orchestration across the service layer.

What until now has been a rather disjointed market with many different niche solutions and perspectives on what a service broker should look like and how it should behave within a service provider’s network, has begun to come into focus. According to the recently formed Service Broker Forum, a service broker is by definition a standalone network element that resides between the service layer and the converging network. It serves to decouple the core switch from application servers and service execution and creation environments. The service broker product class provides an efficient and cost effective means to manage application connectivity, application-to-network interaction and application orchestration across the service layer.

While the emergence of the service broker product category may be new, the concept and underlying need has been building for some time. The service broker origin can be found in the 3GPP definition of the Service Capability Interaction Manager (SCIM). The definition has recently been enhanced and expanded to deal with the various converging network and converging application challenges Tier 1 service providers are facing.

The 3GPP expanded interpretation, combined with a couple of other market factors, has led to the current momentum behind the service broker. The ongoing need to address the complexity of the evolving network has brought service providers to the realization that there must be an alternative to the traditional siloed, niche connectivity and interworking models. The combined forces of the current economic reality, the competitive landscape and the need to drive down costs, leverage existing resources and increase revenue have caused additional momentum behind the service broker solution.

The reality is that what was once the promise of an all IMS NGN has given way to the reality that the next network will continue to be more of a hybrid, leveraging old, current and new resources going forward. As my sixth grade social studies teacher always said, “The only constant is change,” so goes the ongoing network evolution. It’s best to be prepared to manage the change by leveraging the service broker to take advantage of yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s resources.

Wally Beck is senior director of marketing for AppTrigger Inc., where he is responsible for the company’s partner program and channel marketing efforts on a worldwide basis. An accomplished marketing and sales operations professional with more than 20 years of experience within the telecom networking and service provider space, he has served in key marketing and sales operations roles at Cisco, Extreme Networks and Sprint. Beck holds an undergraduate degree in business from Southern Methodist University and a master’s degree in business from the University of Kansas.

By Manuel Vexler, IMS Forum

Recently, IMS joined a list of “misused” standards which, under the effect of market forces, changed direction by 180 degrees. These standards were originally intended for other applications, however they found their mass market appeal in other directions than the one originally intended by their creators.

IMS is not the first and for sure not the last case where standards are designed for one application, just to find that they are used for another.

As examples, let's start with the Ethernet, which at 10MB/s was running at a hard-to-imagine speed when modems were still running at a few KB/s. Of course, it was destined to be a LAN working over very short distances. Ethernet is now known as a 10/100 GB Ethernet point-to-point connection and can run thousands of miles on a fiber optic cable. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) started as a peer-to-peer (P2P) music download standard, just to morph into a signaling standard used in IMS. And finally, IMS started life as a mobile broadband standard and is now used as a replacement for ... you guessed, softswitches. Used for VoIP delivery, the softswitches are used in both fixed and mobile networks to deliver a single, narrowband service.

IMS, however, will see at least one more turn as market forces will push convergence and multimedia in telecom networks worldwide. The writing is on the wall. Many service providers and in some cases regulators, are busy combining fixed and mobile voice business units in converged organizations. That will make the introduction of IMS easier and faster as it simplifies both the business case and maximizes the OPEX savings. It also forces the regulators to reconsider basic things such as the definition of a voice call — since for now TDM calls, cellular calls and VoIP calls are regulated separately.

The change to IMS also is helped (sadly) by the economic crisis, as companies have less financial means to keep competing point solutions in operation; for example, VoIP and PSTN fixed line are being delivered on multiple non-IMS platforms. With major and mid-sized service providers entering into new markets such as video delivery and content delivery, there is still a question why the IMS business case is still made on softswitch replacement. Maybe we should wait for a couple of more years so LTE will finally provide a competitive amount of wireless bandwidth (when compared with 3G) and demand the level of quality-of-service required by new interactive media.

Also, for a final comparison, let's go back to the Ethernet model, and talk about the mutation of standards – that is when a standard jumps from one transport medium to another. After all, Ethernet is closely related to the WiFi and WiMAX architectures. So how will IMS mutate?

Manuel Vexler is chair of the technical working group in the IMS Forum. He is well known for his expertise in voice and multimedia over Internet, bringing more than 20 years of experience to roles such as the CTO of CopperCom and vice president of IMS Interoperability at the IMS Forum. He drove M&A at Cisco, and launched new technologies at CopperCom, AMD, Alcatel (Newbridge) and Nortel.

By Tom Munro, CEO, Verimatrix Inc.

The current scramble to create video portal sites and offer juicy selections of over-the-top (OTT) content seems to have bypassed many of the normal sanity checks applied to media investments. While jostling for technology leadership with the smoothest video delivery and flashiest user interface, the new landscape now has many pay-TV operators and even content providers trying to figure out, one, how to position these new resources alongside more traditional delivery channels and, two, if and how to generate incremental revenue. Drawing a parallel with the plight of another industry, it’s almost as though the news barons had invented CraigsList and then were left wondering why their classified ad business slowed down.

As a part of this whole process, many of the systematic checks involved in licensing rights to content seem to have been sidelined. Cable operators, for instance, were guaranteed the exclusive rights to deliver premium content to their subscribers only once they had demonstrated adequate delivery security. The more highly valued the content, the higher the restrictions for content security.

We are now seeing OTT operators like Hulu and Joost offering a way to bypass cable, satellite and IPTV operators, and at least a growing urban legend about swathes of consumers who have terminated their pay-TV contracts and now live an anonymous and largely unrestricted life on broadband alone. Those operators that have paid a lot of money to gain rights to much of content are alarmed by the prospect of large-scale streaming content over the Internet.

For viewers, unrestricted content could pose an issue for objectionable material, particularly for minors. There seems to be a major gap on employing any parental controls or enforcing content ratings with OTT services when compared to traditional TV with filtering options like the V-Chip.

How can these operators compete when the rules have changed so dramatically?

Everyone agrees that OTT services are a growing trend that cannot be ignored by pay-TV operators. For example, the Broadband Services Forum is encouraging service providers to embrace OTT video as a valuable service that can leverage their network assets and provide a differentiated service.

The key is for traditional operators to leverage the technological advantages of OTT, while retaining a larger measure of control over the consumer experience. Control comes in the form of navigation and branding of an aggregated service by tracking who is accessing the service and the application with reasonable consumption rules. An OTT content service that’s associated with a pay-TV subscription seems to offer significantly more value for all stages of the value chain.

Anonymous streaming services where no registration is required makes it impossible to really know your audience or to associate viewer habits with other demographic details (and therefore it’s harder to convince advertisers to spend money with and online service). By authenticating users for a value-added OTT component of a pay-TV offering, audience targeting is much more powerful. Plus navigation can include more social networking information, which typically translates into a better viewing experience.

An authentication platform for the OTT service can also ensure the right subscribers are accessing the content packages associated with their subscription and extend their rights to more flexible consumption models. Can subscribers only view streaming content or download it for later playback? What are the usage rules once they’ve downloaded it? How are the content rating rules enforced for adult or objectionable content? If a subscriber is late on payments, can operators take action to limit their viewing choices?

It is impossible to reverse the expanded consumer expectations of online content availability, but we are still in the early days of really establishing a viable business model around such access. We are also in the early days of ensuring that such access doesn’t fundamentally damage the whole ecosystem through rampant piracy. Since they can’t beat it, pay-TV operators have to find a way to join the movement and enhance the offerings – but in a way that raises the standard of OTT content and the overall consumer experience.

Tom Munro is CEO of Verimatrix Inc., a provider of software-based content security and revenue enhancement technologies in pay-TV networks. Munro has more than 22 years of experience in both finance and technology. Prior to Verimatrix, he was president of Wireless Facilities Inc., a provider of design, deployment and management of wireless mobility and broadband wireless networks. Munro holds bachelor's and master’s degrees in business administration from the University of Washington. He has co-authored two college level text books on computer programming.