Most industry experts agree that transactional voice services are a solution on the rise. According to Datamonitor’s “Predictions for Voice Solutions” (Feb. 14th, 2005), investments in transactional voice product lines are expected to increase more than six-fold over the next three years. In growing to a nearly half-billion dollar industry, the transactional Voice category will require advanced integration abilities from both the transactional services and the voice services sectors. By leveraging the Service Broker or Service Coordinator as defined by IMS and MSF, speedy integration of data/voice services will be enabled, based on a common approach to the presentation of data and interfaces across converged wireless and wireline networks.

Service brokering becomes especially important when a mix of application technologies are deployed in service provider networks such as SCPs, application servers, and service-rich softswitches. Often they must be coordinated to provide a custom package of advanced services. Service brokering combined with on-the-fly programmability maximizes service choice and eliminates development cycle, network wide deployment and service activation bottlenecks. Service broker functionality enhanced with Veraz Networks' patent pending technology accelerates these voice transaction applications and positions service providers in this new exciting voice services segment. Thus, providers seize the transactional voice revenue opportunities before the competition, decreasing customer churn and increasing average revenue-per-user (ARPU).

To deliver on the promise of integration of diverse services, the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture needs to be complemented by the special services coordination layer, in this case the Service Broker. The main features of this layer should include:

• A common and standard framework, which would define services execution model and service interfaces (billing, management, service control, etc.). This helps to define the new services or encapsulate existing services for “orchestration” by the service coordination layer. The framework itself does not necessarily need to be invented specifically for voice services. A better approach would be to adopt emerging web services/semantic web approaches and to provide improved synergy with web applications/data applications (including transactional applications). This approach would help to complement on-the-fly programmability with on-the-fly integration of voice and data applications. This combination is critical from the point of view of a telecom services evolution strategy. This approach addresses both newly emerging services and existing services (through encapsulation) and ensures smooth evolution of service infrastructure and customers to more flexible service models and environments.
• A well-defined mechanism for semantic processing of service models and service descriptions. This ensures adequate service interactions resolution and enables the above-mentioned on-the-fly integration and ability to combine diverse services in the common packages to satisfy the requirements for high-value and feature-rich service offerings. This is necessary for the framework since there may be significant differences in the semantics of data and voice applications
• A common service coordination framework and mechanism for semantic processing of service models that covers all stages of the service delivery: definition, design, provisioning and execution. This will play a large role in achieving high efficiency of the service delivery.
• Coordination layer (service broker) independence from the individual service logic and services independence and isolation from each other.
• Standardization and wide industry adoption. This is the only way to become a potent driver for the service delivery efficiency.

The implementation of the above approaches would lead to seamless integration of new classes of services into the IMS, dramatic cost savings for service providers and high value services for the end user. As proof of this concept, this approach could be applied to transactional services first as the demand for this type of applications shows robust growth.

For example, one could take order processing or any other existing transactional service and encapsulate it with coordination framework interfaces. It would then be ready for seamless integration with softswitch voice services, which also follows the same architecture. In the case of new transactional service implementation, following the framework architecture would lead to an even cleaner implementation and would be even less costly, since there is no encapsulation work involved. In short, integration work for any combination of services will be dramatically decreased.

In closing, it is important to reiterate the key benefits for service providers: Service integration is provided in real-time; service revenue is increased; scalability is unlimited; subscriber churn is reduced; and customer loyalty is increased. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a competitive differentiation is created. There is a lot of hope for the future of Transactional Voice Services. If the service broker/service coordinator layer can be properly leveraged, then the sector will have a fantastic opportunity to realize its great potential.

Amit Chawla is Executive Vice President of marketing for Veraz Networks.

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