Evolution of SOA Concepts in Telecommunications

The telecommunications industry has always been service-oriented. However, the convergence-driven need to deliver seamless services across different access networks has forced operators to embrace new approaches, including the intelligent network, Web-services-based APIs, and, most recently, the IP multimedia subsystem. Today, SOA is considered state of the art for service-delivery platforms. Such platforms for value-added services have evolved from the intelligent network (IN) and object-oriented programming interfaces to recent Web-services-based platforms. They´ve exploited the most recent information technologies to implement an open set of service components. Web 2.0´s recent emergence, meanwhile, has further pressured telecom companies to implement an open service market based on an open set of enabling services and service components.