Intense business competition and the rise of new service providers that provide telephone services in a nontraditional and economical manner are a serious threat to today’s telecommunication companies. Product bundles involving Internet protocol television (IPTV), voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), and broadband Internet are gaining popularity. In addition to traditional landline phone services, telecom companies are changing their focus to provide more value added services to their customers. Thus, the scalability of operations systems support/business systems support (OSS/BSS) applications is a big challenge for telecom companies, which have to add new services quickly and economically. Adding new services involves huge efforts and heavy investments from an information technology (IT) perspective. In this paper, the authors discuss the practical service-oriented architecture (SOA) methodology, which will enable telecom companies to add services in an efficient and economical manner.

The discussion starts with telecom product bundling concepts, and their importance from a business perspective. The authors also discuss the latest market trends, which have forced telecom companies to adopt an SOA approach. To provide additional services, the IT applications of telecom companies have to interface with multiple internal and external applications. These external applications may be third-party applications. An SOA environment is mandatory for this. A four-phased approach, with necessary illustrations, to transition today’s IT applications to an SOA environment is detailed. At the end, a case study about CallTV is discussed, with use case diagrams. CallTV is an application that combines conversations with television. Neatly done but elaborate diagrams add more value to the descriptions in this five-page paper. The paper discusses a hot topic from a telecom perspective. I consider it a good read.