Transforming the Network

Alternative. Classical. Country Western. Jazz. Rap.

There are plenty of ways to classify music, yet with the fusion of so many musical influences, artists are increasingly uncomfortable trying to pigeonhole their work with a single tag.

The same seems to be true in networking today.

You have your Ethernet, IP, optics, video, voice and wireless services and technologies, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to clearly define one from another. And, frankly, most service providers — excited about selling the idea of “blended services” — don’t want to draw such distinctions.

“There is an innovation big-bang going on,” says BT Group CTO Matt Bross. “And what you have is, all these technologies that we work with, whether they’re wireless, they’re dense wave division multiplexing, computing, stor-age, display — these technologies are increasing in their capabilities at 10x. And we can understand that. But I think that it’s often missed while we talk about convergence what’s actually happening in terms of the innovation possibili-ties. If you look at what’s happening … the possibilities are just increasing phenomenally.”

This move to blended services is of key importance to service providers, says Cindy Christy, president of North America for Alcatel-Lucent, noting her company’s surveys show customers are willing to pay more for blended services. In contrast, she says, simply bundled services translate into customer discounts that drive down service pro-vider revenue.

Yet, despite all the focus on applications and the user, Christy says the network remains of key importance, so as service provider customers move to IP to support new services, Alcatel-Lucent also is providing them with the tools to leverage what they already have. The move to new services, she adds, also requires operators to drive service intelligence across the network and to ensure the network offers the reliability and resilience that will translate into delivering good customer experiences.

“There’s no such thing as dumb pipes anymore,” says Christy. “They’re all smart pipes.”

Here, Christy gets to the idea of network transformation. And it’s a big idea. One that’s happening at all levels of the network and even — and perhaps most importantly — up at the applications level.

So let’s take a look at some of the prevalent themes that surfaced at NXTcomm relating to network transformation — starting up around the application layer.

Service Creation and Execution

SDP, or service delivery platform, is a concept being pushed by such IT companies as BEA Systems Inc., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. — as well as a new crop of SDP-specific vendors like Aepona and Redknee, and to some extent the traditional telecom vendors — to enable service providers to more easily, and affordably, deliver innovative services by themselves, or in collaboration with third-party application developers.

SDP solutions employ Web Services to avail service provider networks to the applications of third parties. Some folks argue that the term SDP is ill-defined, but Chris King, senior director of worldwide telco markets at BEA, says the key SDP players are pretty much aligned on the core set of functionality for a service delivery platform.

In a March 2007 study called “Service Delivery Platform Success Requires a Strategy Vision and Corporate Col-laboration,” Michele Pelino, a senior analyst with Forrester Research Inc., says an SDP must include a service creation environment that gives developers tools (like software, scripts and APIs to network services like presence, location and messaging) for quickly creating new applications; a service execution environment (including gateway servers like Parlay to enable applications and service to be delivered to multiple devices based on specific requirements, and the ability to interface with BSSs and OSSs); and service management capabilities to ensure reliability and customer care.

Of course, SDPs are not new. Service providers have SDPs in place today, but this old line of SDPs was erected in a one-off, or “siloed,” fashion because telecom operators to date have lacked a simple way of creating and delivering services using a more holistic approach. The new generation of SDPs that recently has appeared on the scene is all about “openness” and the ability for third parties to interface with carrier networks via standard APIs.

“Service providers are really looking to transform their business models,” says Aepona Vice President of Marketing Michael Crossey. “They’re under threat by Google and Yahoo. ... So telcos run risk of becoming a dumb pipe. Telcos need to regain control of the customer.” And telcos have the rich information about their customers to be able to do so, says Crossey of Aepona, which at NXTcomm introduced a wireline version of its Telecom Web Services solution, used by such service providers as Sprint and TELUS.

Aepona was among the Microsoft partners at NXTcomm that demonstrated new service combinations created in the Connected Services Sandbox. The services were examples of mash-ups that bring together communications applications with content from a variety of sources to deliver a compelling experience to the end user. The demos included combinations of services such as voice, e-mail, IM, mapping and search.

David Mangini, global solution owner for SDP at IBM, says his company believes SDP is tied intimately to the concept of the long-tail of the Internet.

“That’s where new service creation really starts to take a different feel,” adds Mangini. “If they’re interested in pur-suing a long tail, they want to offer new services quickly, inexpensively, and with low risk” that allows them to launch and take down services as needed.

IMS

The IMS architecture continues on the theme of breaking down service-specific network silos and abstracting the services layer from the network to lower costs and allow for more rapid introduction of new services.

While the IMS architecture is considered by some to be rather nebulous, Michael H. Cooper, vice president of marketing and strategy for the convergence business group at Alcatel-Lucent, says the industry recently has begun to reach consensus on what constitutes an IMS deployment. According to Cooper, that includes a CSCF (call session control function platform), an HSS (home subscriber server, a database of subscriber information) and an application server. “Some say it has to be more than one application, but if you have an application server, you’re in pretty good shape,” he says.

Of course, many recent reports and discussions indicate the bloom is off the IMS rose, but there is still a big piece of the industry that believes much of the industry is heading toward the IMS architecture over the long term.

Jody Bennett, vice president of marketing at GENBAND Inc., a VoIP equipment provider and IMS proponent, is among that camp. “Products are more in a test and limited deployment phase” at this point, he says, but over time, IMS will be the architecture “that will dominate.”

But just exactly what that transition to IMS will look like depends on the service provider.

One service provider might opt to transform its database systems first, consolidating all data within an HSS, says Cooper, while another might move first to an all-IP core, as BT and KPN elected to do. “Originally, people thought IMS was supposed to be big-bang, but it doesn’t need to be,” he says.

The bottom line, as Arun Sobti, chairman and CEO of IP Unity Glenayre, aptly puts it, is those first to implement IMS will be those whose businesses depend upon it. So expect the wireline operators losing money to wireless, and service providers that have bet the farm on 3G and now need to monetize that investment, to be first to the IMS plate, he says.

ATCA and Blades

Clearly, distributed networking is a key theme of IMS. This distributed theme also applies nicely into standards-based multipurpose telecom server solutions, like ATCA gear, which the industry saw plenty of at NXTcomm. The modular, telecom-grade solutions allow service providers to add functionality by inserting blades into a multipurpose server, as opposed to facing “death by the pizza box,” as Verizon once put it.

Continuous Computing at NXTcomm introduced a new deep packet inspection (DPI) blade for IBM’s BladeCenter solution and, separately, unveiled a low-profile, ATCA-based 20gbps DPI appliance.

CTO and co-founder Mike Coward says IBM has not traditionally addressed DPI-related functionality required by such services and applications as IPTV, bandwidth shaping, high-speed antivirus prevention and intrusion detection. These features now are available from Continuous Computing on an ATCA platform, but will be available on Blade-Center by the beginning of this year or early next year.

The importance of bandwidth shaping continues to grow as IPTV subscribers multiply, says Coward. In order to handle that growth, service providers need to start shaping traffic to ensure new, bandwidth-intensive applications like video on demand are delivered at the quality customers expect, he says.

Today, service providers can add DPI or antivirus functionality, but typically need separate appliances for each time, adds Coward. Putting it all into BladeCenter makes these features easier to install and more scalable.

Tip of the Iceberg

Of course, all the networking trends discussed above are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s happening with both network — and services — transformation.

As the video services Coward mentions above become more prevalent on service provider networks, carriers are pumping up the bandwidth — and figuring out how to allocate that bandwidth most efficiently — all the way from the access connection, throughout the transport network and into the core.

And telcos, which traditionally have kept their hands off the network once it reaches the demarcation point, now are exploring the world of home networking and trying to push their way into managed services on the business front.

Get more from the xchange's new eBook, “A Window Into NXTcomm,” sponsored by Fujitsu Network Communications, as xchange’s editors who attended the show in Chicago peer into many of the prevalent themes that surfaced relating to network transformation — from PBT and ROADM to WiMAX and home networking.

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