Dittberner: Semantics will Unblock Telecom Integration Middleware Bottleneck

Middleware, as it is used in the telecom back office, was a $1.1 billion industry in 2007. It may grow to $1.3 billion by 2011, but J2EE, the dominant form of middleware won’t grow with it. Open Source alternatives are on the rise.

Dan Baker, analyst at Dittberner Associates and author of a new study called, “Semantics, Network Mediation, BPM & Service Orchestration: Solutions to Power the Next Generation of Telecom Integration Middleware,” said the use of J2EE will peak “mainly due to price competition with Red Hat’s open source and other standards.”

He said service providers have struggled to integrate their many network- and customer-facing systems for years, but have made little progress. They have burned too many development cycles trying to perfect integration through several generations of middleware, including EAI and J2EE, and technologies and architectures such as the enterprise service bus and service oriented architecture.

Baker sees a “passing of the guard” as older middleware makes way for a new generation of solutions aimed at solving some long standing issues. He pointed to companies such as Telstra, which is using semantic modeling and transformation software from Progress Software to help it consolidate hundreds of OSS systems. He calls this the SID in action. The SID is the Shared Information Data model standard from the TM Forum.

He said SOA have proved difficult to implement because there are simply too many design choices to model. Here, he pointed to Qwest, which is implementing a "service inventory" solution from Atreus that allows the hundreds of core processes in a telecommuter IP-Centrex service to be reused in mobile and VoIP service areas.

BEA has been the leader in the middleware market before it was acquired by Oracle. But said, Baker, along came Red Hat’s acquisition of open source middleware provider, JBOSS. “JBOSS is, for all intents and purposes, the same as BEA. But when you go to BEA you get a heck of a lot more support,” he said. “But Red Hat’s business is taking over open source software and wrapping support around it. This will cause downward pricing on BEA and hurt them in the long term.”

Another burgeoning solution, if it gets beyond its initial implementation at Verizon Business, is Nakina Systems’ element mediation layer, also known as the Network Operating System (NOS.) Verizon Business uses it to speed the customization of services in optical and Ethernet domains.

“Finally someone is making a dent in these nice-to-have standards such as OSS-J and real solutions are starting to materialize,” Baker said.

Using the semantic capabilities of standards like the SID, service providers, even with their unique models of their particular network architectures, can understand each others' models.