SOA as an Effective Tool for the Flexible Management of Increased Service Heterogeneity in Converged Enterprise Networks

Traditional service management techniques and frameworks are inadequate to handle new generation integrated applications and cross-enterprise business processes and services. Thus, there emerges a call for a management architecture that can provide the real-time visibility and control from the application and data level through the dynamic service and business process. The service delivery platform (SDP), a telco-version of SOA, is proper, but still not obvious. There is no standard definition for the term or the components that constitute an SDP. In this paper we intend to identify current boundaries of SDP as well as the importance of the concept. We classify and analyze the components and relations between the elements of this management framework. We visualize the results of our analysis through the reference architecture. And, in our representation of the service management framework we provide a rational view of the whole service delivery environment.