SUPER – Telco perspective

Nowadays Telecommunication sector is probably one of the fastest evolving market sectors because of the following factors:

• Appearance of new technologies: broadband, mobile communications, IPTV, VoIP, digital rights, etc.  
• New opportunities that the information society offers thanks to the increasing Internet use  (business in internet).
• Reduced time-to-market, which involves the time needed to prepare systems to offer a new product
• An increase of competitiveness, with many new market entrants and a challenging regulatory environment.
• An increase of new products creation rate in order to generate competitive advantage.
• An increase of B2B relationships between companies to bundle more elaborated services. Customers demand innovative and integrated services which are adapted to their specific needs.
• Entrepreneurial alliances (e.g., Telefónica expansion in South America, acquisition of O2 and Cesky Telecom, agreements with Chinese Netcom,...), regulatory aspects of each country, company internal reorganizations, etc

Enumerated factors are causing a constant need of readjustment of business models. These situations are viewed by telecommunication companies as opportunities that they try to take advantage of.

Challenges to IT Organizations

All the challenges mentioned above and the need of cost reduction strongly impact the traditional form of software development. Telecommunication companies clearly realize the urgent necessity of incorporating new technologies and methodologies that would solve structural problems and provide agility and flexibility to change, such as:

• Incorporation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).
• Evolution from Function Oriented to Process Oriented Organizations
• Incorporation of Business Process Management Systems (BPMS)
• Incorporation of Semantic Technologies

Figure 1: BPM evolution with SUPER

Semantic Technology is a new research area that aims at provision of agility and flexibility to information systems. Industry is expecting that Semantic Technologies will address  the following requirements:

• Business experts will be able to directly model and implement business process without IT people help still using business language.
• Formalization of business concepts and their relations (creation of ontologies)
• Easy composition of and interaction among different processes (internal and other companies’ processes 
• Easy reuse of existing  process fragments
• Tools for business experts to monitor and reengineer processes
• Maximizing the extent of business process lifecycle automation and time-to-market reduction

Telecom industry, being aware of growth in complexity of business environment along with the increase  in  number of processes and services, has a keen interest in applying semantic technologies, and to be more specific, in applying SUPER results to overcome these difficulties.

SUPER extends the promising direction of BPM by using Semantic Web Services (SWS) and creating Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) technology

Through SUPER, telecom industry wants to change the way of developing new products. SUPER offers an environment that facilitates the incorporation of semantics to services and processes, automating a lot of tasks which are nowadays carried out by technical IT people.

Figure 2: SUPER and TMF join forces to combine knowledge

Furthermore, a reference semantic framework for telecommunication called YATOSP is being developed inside the SUPER project. YATOSP is built based on results of TMF NGOSS  (initiative for the standardization of the information systems in telecom industry with a clear consensus) and formalizes a reference ontology of concepts that appear in their data model and processes, so they can be reused later in the semantic definitions of particular telecom processes in each company.

As a final project result, SUPER will demonstrate the effective deployment of SWS and SBPM in different real use cases within the telecommunication industry:

• Distribution of multimedia contents prototype
• Routing, Management, and Troubleshooting prototype
• CRM and Billing integration suite prototype