* Interview with Bob Rosenberg, president Insight Research Corporation
This week we’ll discuss how SIP, IMS, and other IP-centric protocols play a critical role in the “non-network” environment, focusing on how the carrier’s back office and the enterprise IT systems will come to rely on integration between business support systems and the IP network. Today we’ll discuss carrier plans for integration based on an interview with Bob Rosenberg, president at Insight Research Corporation.
Last week, Insight published a study on how phone companies are adopting and integrating IMS, SIP and service delivery platforms (SDP), pointing out that the carriers are adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will allow them to integrate new operational and business support systems with their business customers’ applications while at the same time enable them to wring money out of their older infrastructure. Insight projects that carriers will spend $20 billion on SDP hardware and software over the next five years. Click here for an executive summary of the report.
Rosenberg said in an interview that integrating SIP and IMS into an SOA “may finally be the promise of the intelligent network the carriers have been talking about for 20 years.” He emphasized that any such service creation environment must work at the business process level inside the telco and it must open up both business and network systems. He also noted that such an architecture is needed to provide content and applications on a real-time basis so that suppliers can be paid, telcos can provision and bill the service, and customers can get the quality of service they expected from their subscription.
Finally, Rosenberg said that the carrier’s SOA will eventually integrate with the enterprise SOA because the integrated environment can better provide Web services and other applications. In an example, he cited a case where an IT manager at a branch bank can work directly with the carrier to create a set of services unique to the branch, concluding that the bank and its customers would both gain efficiencies from a service delivery platform that provided ready-made integration.
Next time, we’ll take a closer look at why this integration is important to the enterprise.
