With much of the world so focused on being environmentally friendly, including the green mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” we shouldn’t be surprised that this mentality has crept into the world of communications with the popularity of the Service Oriented Architecture – a computer system’s architectural style for creating and using business processes packaged as services.
The basic idea of the SOA approach is that there is a huge amount of reusability and repeatability across all the products a service provider sells. They may sell a huge number of distinct products to customers. To the customer, the products may look enormously different, but from an internal carrier perspective, they might be 98% the same. The concept of being able to reproduce that 98% from product A to create product B is utterly brilliant to anyone in the communications space.
In the world of communications, it’s reasonably well accepted that internal capabilities and functionality are called “services,” and services are put together to create “products.” So, products are the things that consumers buy.
In the past, this distinction didn’t really exist in a non-service-oriented environment. So for every new product an operator wanted to sell, they basically had to design it from scratch and write all its constituent parts.
An example of what would apply to the idea of reusability is bundling. Where traditionally we might have thought of voice, Internet connectivity and television as three separate services, someone had the brilliant idea of “triple play” and suddenly it became a brand new product, when in reality it’s just three things stuck together.