OSS Observer: Best Days are Ahead for SOA Market

Kelly said service providers should be able to create a metadata model that describes what a customer is what their attributes are. “That model should permeate through the customer care organization and the operations organization so they don’t have their own definitions of the customer, but can pull relationships from that data for their own particular services.”

Other service providers have used SOA to execute their transformational strategies. According to the report, BT implemented a Model Driven Architecture approach to SOA in order to facilitate its time-to-market requirements. Frontier, on the other hand, used SOA to implement a large CRM application and Comcast improved its service delivery by gaining more flexibility in product definition, promotions and billing. SOA also played a large role in Verizon’s IT transformation in preparation of its FiOS rollout.

Kelly recommends in his report that service providers should assess how SOA can achieve tactical advantages in the short term and build a plan for phasing in enterprise-wide initiatives that support converged services.

“Applying SOA and Web services to legacy systems is a worthwhile short-term approach because it avoids expensive replacement alternatives and promotes re-use,” Kelly said in his report.