OASIS Members Form Committee to Address Gaps in SOA Standards for Telecommunications

Microsoft, Primeton, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, BT, HP, Nortel, Telecom Italia, NEC, and Others Collaborate to Help Telecoms Offer Secure, Intelligent Services

Boston, MA, USA; 27 January 2009 — The international open standards consortium, OASIS, has formed a new group to extend the core Web 2.0 and SOA standards stack to support the specific needs of telecommunications operators and providers. The new OASIS SOA for Telecom (SOA-Tel) Technical Committee will develop use cases and define requirements that will make telecommunications services more intelligent, deployable, and easy to consume. “Current SOA technologies were designed for IT use cases. Applying them to the telecom world is not always straightforward,” said Mike Giordano of Avaya, co-chair of the OASIS SOA-Tel Technical Committee. “In telecom, services and network features are often tightly coupled and vertically integrated. Tight coupling limits the ability of operators to develop new composite services that span heterogeneous networks. Vertical integration reduces access to service management functions, making it very difficult to automate operations and business processes across organizations.” “Our work will enable telecom operators and providers to offer their clients converged, identity-based services that are available at any time, secure across any access network, and independent of any operating system, device, or location,” added John Storrie of Nortel, co-chair of the OASIS SOA-Tel Technical Committee. The group’s first task will be to identify areas where existing standards don’t go far enough to meet the needs of telecom operators. Participants will focus on issues such as testability, scalability, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and reliability. Support for session and event-based interactions, service ontologies and failure modes will be addressed. “Our goal is to make it easy for telecom companies to rapidly deploy new services that leverage their existing infrastructures,” said Abbie Barbir of Nortel, co-chair of the OASIS Telecom Member Section Steering Committee. “The potential for new revenue streams is tremendous.” The Committee intends to build on work done in other telecommunications-oriented organizations, such as the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a standards body for the mobile phone industry, ITU-T, and TM Forum, an industry association that develops management standards for telecoms. “The OASIS effort brings telecommunications operators and providers from around the world together with SOA experts,” said James Bryce Clark, director of standards development at OASIS. “Any company that utilizes telecom networks to provide service to subscribers–whether or not they own the network assets or services–should be represented on this Committee.” Participation in SOA-Tel remains open to all interested parties. Archives of the Committee’s work will be accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS will offer a mechanism for public comment. The SOA-Tel Committee has affiliated under the OASIS Telecom Member Section. Support for SOA-Tel Nortel “The user experience will be enhanced when IT and consumer applications can directly leverage the capabilities of the underlying communications infrastructure. The OASIS SOA-Tel Technical Committee will extend SOA and Web 2.0 technologies to access telecom functionality. It will help applications solve real business and social communications problems, efficiently and cost-effectively,” said Vish Nandlall, CTO, Carrier Networks, Nortel.” Primeton “With the largest subscription base, Chinese telecom industry faces mounting challenges to build and upgrade their business and operation support systems. Primeton joins the OASIS SOA-Tel Committee to bridge SOA-Tel with our elite telecom customers and also help Chinese telecom industry to maximize the value of SOA technologies to build flexible, extensible and scalable business solutions,” said Chris Cheng, VP of Primeton Technologies. Red Hat “Having deep expertise in Enterprise, SOA and Telco middleware, Red Hat recognizes the emerging demand for sophisticated integration between core network telephony systems and IT operational support systems. We look forward to see guidelines, best practices and over time standardized interfaces resulting from the OASIS SOA-Tel initiative,” said Ivelin Ivanov, Director, Development, JBoss Communications Platform at Red Hat. Additional information: OASIS SOA-Tel Technical Committee OASIS Telecom Member Section About OASIS: OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. OASIS promotes industry consensus and produces worldwide standards for security, Web services, XML conformance, business transactions, electronic publishing, and other applications. OASIS open standards offer the potential to lower cost, stimulate innovation, grow global markets, and protect the right of free choice of technology. OASIS members broadly represent the marketplace of public and private sector technology leaders, users and influencers. The consortium has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. http://www.oasis-open.org Press contact: Carol Geyer OASIS Director of Communications carol.geyer@oasis-open.org +1.978.667.5115 x209 (office) +1.941.284.0403 (mobile)