Caroline Chappell Quotations

The nature of the telecom service business is changing -- services are becoming more numerous, varied, and complex. Operators expect to sell hundreds if not thousands of services, which means service delivery may soon require a wide range of policy-based variables, including presence management, time of day, device type, subscriber permission, subscriber preference, subscriber age, location, role, billing arrangement, and many others. Operators will need to store the expanding range of parameters that can be applied to individual subscribers and check against these to see which features apply as soon as a user requests a service.

Until recently, the SDP has been very much a mobile network initiative, and most SDP suppliers have roots in the mobile industry. However, fixed network operators, and even cable companies, are leading the next round of SDP adoption.

What operators should be doing ?- and what the standards bodies working in this area are encouraging them to do ?- is to create a policy architecture : a unified framework that embraces all the layers of policy needed in their organization.

The next shift is to an object-oriented form of distributed application that is Web-enabled and peer-to-peer -- and here's where the old types of middleware run out of steam. The new companies bubbling up in this area want to ensure they can underpin the new paradigm, and IBM obviously thinks it's best to buy one of the few hardware companies here than try and build something itself.