By Daniel Marcus, Marketing Director, MetaSwitch
At the recent NXTComm show in Chicago, MetaSwitch launched a service delivery platform
(SDP) product as part of its ground-breaking MetaSphere applications suite. For many readers,
this probably leads to the question "so what is an SDP anyway?"
An SDP is more than a single product or component within
the network. It is a suite of interconnected products, both virtual and logical,
that enable flexible service creation, modification and subscriber personalization. SDPs
allow services to be created and customized for specific customers' needs in
unprecedented ways.
Some examples of potential new network-spanning services that SDPs could enable include:
- Subscriber configured sporting and event results, pushed to the subscriber
based on location and device (utilizing one set of parameters, for the subscriber's handset,
computer, or TV)
- Proximity and date-based events and alerts to points of interest based on
the subscriber's tastes and feedback
- Subscriber configured news results that push local news updates for
pre-configured locations as well as in response to the subscriber's actual location
- Real-time billing and self-subscription, enabling subscribers to determine
their current usage plan, activate additional services and view their bill in real time.
The key functional areas addressed by an SDP include the Service Creation Environment
(SCE), the Service Execution Environment (SEE), and common service support functions.
The Service Creation Environment (SCE) provides an easily accessible menu of
pre-built blocks of service logic. The service developer accesses the SCE via a Graphical User Interface
(GUI) and the SCE provides the front end for the Service Execution Environment.
The Service Execution Environment is the native resource pool that enables the
rapid commercial development and deployment of applications. By distributing the Service Execution
Environment across a server farm, the SDP weds standardized application development software with
farms of functionally identical servers. These servers communicate through open-standards like SIP,
SMTP and HTTP to enable simplified integration with legacy platforms.
Common Service Support Functions refer to basic software elements that provide
call control and media control uniformly across all services. These provide developers with a generic
library of functions that is extensible across platforms.
IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is well known as a model the telecom industry is
adopting for network convergence. What is not as well understood is the relationship between IMS and SDPs.
The answer is that IMS is the industry-standard blueprint for many of the protocol interfaces and
functional elements implemented by SDPs. For example, the IMS Service Control (ISC) interface defines
how the SDP communicates call control information with the softswitch. However, this does not mean that
operators must have fully migrated to IMS before they can reap the advantages of an SDP: many SDPs,
including MetaSphere, can be deployed successfully in both legacy as well as next generation network
environments. So, while some commentators portray IMS and SDP as alternatives, in reality they are
complementary.
SDPs benefit from the convergence of several recent computing
and telecommunication industry trends including open source software development
and interface standardization, as well as
powerful advances in low-cost computing platforms. As a result of these trends,
the technology that powers SDPs is now sufficiently distributed, open, cost-effective
and powerful enough to enable
commercial SDP availability.
Read more about MetaSwitch's SDP
Back to the August 2007 newsletter
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