The OASIS open standards consortium announced a new initiative aimed at bringing the full advantages of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to the telecommunications industry. The OASIS Telecommunications Services Member Section (OASIS Telecom) will work to pave the way for a new business model that will make telecommunications services more intelligent, deployable, and easy to consume.

“We recognize there are gaps that prevent today's SOA standards from delivering the complete integration and interoperability that telecommunications providers need,” said Abbie Barbir, Ph.D., of Nortel, co-chair of the OASIS Telecom Steering Committee. “The most effective way to bridge these gaps is a cooperative effort that brings the expertise of telecommunications, IT, and standards bodies together within the organization that is responsible for defining core SOA standards.”

OASIS is home, not only to the Service Component Architecture (SCA), Service Data Objects (SDO), and SOA-Reference Model (SOA-RM), but also to related standards such as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), WS-Security, WS-Federation, WS-Transaction, ebXML, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Universal Business Language (UBL), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).

Through the formation and oversight of new technical committees, OASIS Telecom will work to optimize the Web services stack for telecommunications industry and develop common data models to enable the seamless exchange of information between networks and between the network and application domains. OASIS Telecom members will also align work already in place at OASIS and in the telecommunications community on identity and naming.

“By exposing the underlying value of the network to IT applications—while at the same time allowing the network to access IT services—OASIS Telecom can enable communications companies to redefine their role from access providers to service providers,” said Stephane H. Maes of Oracle, co-chair of the OASIS Telecom Steering Committee. “The work of OASIS Telecom will help communications companies achieve a homogeneous environment that spans time-sensitive and traditional IT services.”

In addition to Barbir and Maes, the OASIS Telecom Steering Committee includes Michael Brenner of Alcatel-Lucent, Zulah Eckert of BEA Systems, Takashi Egawa of NEC, Orit Levine of Microsoft, and Tony Nadalin of IBM.

Foundational Support for OASIS Telecom:

BEA
“Enterprises have long wanted secure access to the telecommunications network, and service exposure, especially through SOA, is critically important to telecommunications service providers,” said Ed Cobb, vice president of emerging technology and standards at BEA Systems. “The current work of OASIS in SCA, SOA and BPEL make the OASIS Telecommunications Services Member Section an ideal venue for this effort.”

IBM
“As a founding member of OASIS Telecom, IBM is looking forward to the opportunity to help optimize Web services technology for use by the telecommunications industry. This important work can help our clients meet the specific, real-time, scalability, reliability, and security requirements faced by those in this industry,” said Anthony Nadalin, IBM Distinguished Engineer and chief security architect for IBM Tivoli Software. “OASIS is ideally suited to bring together the security, SOA, and telecom communities to drive the development and adoption of this project.”

Oracle
“Oracle is committed to bringing IT standards to the communications industry, as demonstrated by the Oracle Service Delivery Platform, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. OASIS Telecom can help extend key IT standards throughout the communications industry to help address the many challenges service providers face today,” said Don Deutsch Vice President Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle.

Primeton
“With the largest subscription base, the Chinese telecom industry faces mounting challenges to build and upgrade their business and operation support systems. Primeton has joined OASIS Telecom to help our elite telecommunications customers maximize the value of SOA technologies to build flexible, extensible, and scalable solutions,” said Larry Huang, CTO of Primeton Technologies.

Sponsor Support:

Alcatel-Lucent
“The possibility to rapidly deploy rich applications for end customers is a critical advantage for our customers,” said Denis Attal, CTO Applications Business at Alcatel-Lucent. “We believe that OASIS Telecom will harmonize and optimize the capabilities of SOA architectures in telecommunications, notably for interoperability, thus contributing very positively to our business commitments.”

Microsoft
“Microsoft is pleased to join OASIS Telecom and help the telecommunications domain take the full advantage of the service oriented architecture,” said Orit Levin, program manager for policy and standards at Microsoft. “We look forward to taking an active role with others in OASIS Telecom to ensure the suitability of existing and future Web services specifications to meet the real-time, scalability, reliability, and security requirements of the telecommunications industry.”

NEC
“NEC is pleased to support the establishment of OASIS Telecom. Its effort to bridge the gap between the telecommunication sector and the IT sector corresponds to the Next Generation Network (NGN), the revolution currently underway. Thanks to these efforts, we will be able to develop a more flexible, easy-to-use, secure, and dependable ICT infrastructure,” said Masanobu Yamaguchi, Executive General Manager of Network Software Operations Unit, NEC Corporation.

Nortel
“The user experience is greatly enhanced when applications of the IT world are highly collaborative and can interact with and leverage the capabilities of the underlying communications infrastructure,” said Peter Carbone, vice president, Service-Oriented Architectures, Nortel. “The OASIS Telecom Member Section provides a clear focus to extend SOA and Web services technologies to quickly and easily create new applications and services to solve real business problems, efficiently, and cost-effectively.”

Progress Software
“Progress Software is proud to participate in OASIS Telecom. A primary task of the new group will be to evangelize the use of SOA in telecommunications, which Progress has long been promoting. We also look forward to working with other OASIS leaders to leverage frameworks from the TM Forum and other telecommunications consortia to construct common data models and SOA reference models that can help service providers and network operators to optimize their B/OSS infrastructure,” said John Wilmes, Chief Technical Architect, Communications Sector, Progress Software.