In telecommunications, urgent customer demands for new services are outpacing the ability to deploy and manage them. According to both business and engineering executives, this challenge is becoming more acute as the variety of services grows to incorporate customer-defined managed services and enhanced Web applications.
All services draw from a multitude of resources.
Today, these resources must be increasingly coordinated in an automated and adaptable manner. Launch times are compressed, and service integration has therefore become more challenging at a time when new service projects are expected to recover costs rapidly. As a result, project managers face the danger of being whipsawed between the need to launch so many new services and the need to support each one continuously over a period of time. Service providers are using mediation to eliminate manual processes and separate support infrastructures for services. Service providers and integrators tell us that these benefits translate into faster, lower-cost rollouts and the reuse of objects for continued support.