Rapid Service Creation Environment for service delivery platform based on service templates

Abstract

The requirement of quickly creating new value-added telecom services is increasingly becoming a business imperative today. Telecom operators and service providers are facing the challenge how to reduce cost and time-to-market of creating new services. The reduction is expected to be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude from months or weeks to days, even hours. In traditional Service Creation Environment, a full lifecycle of requirements analyzing, design, development, testing and deployment always has to be undergone. Such way of services creation always results in poor reuse of software assets and involves mass resources. Some technologies have been developed to speed up steps in this lifecycle, such as BPEL or SCXML. These orchestration techniques and tools are already used to reduce cost in design and development stages but the creation procedure still rely on attendance of IT specialists. This paper presents a way to shorten and simplify the whole service creation lifecycle and to reach the reduction target by building a template based Service Creation Environment. A model is used to separate service work flow definition and service parameters configuration and to achieve rapid development for different roles. A prototype of template based service creation environment is also introduced in this paper.