Is There a Service Broker in Your Future?

Wally Beck, Senior Director of Marketing, AppTrigger Inc.

By now, many of you may have heard the recent buzz around the growing momentum within the service broker market. Service broker solutions have emerged as a result of service providers exploring new innovative ways to manage their application connectivity, application to network interaction and application orchestration across the service layer.

What until now has been a rather disjointed market with many different niche solutions and perspectives on what a service broker should look like and how it should behave within a service provider’s network, has begun to come into focus. According to the recently formed Service Broker Forum, a service broker is by definition a standalone network element that resides between the service layer and the converging network. It serves to decouple the core switch from application servers and service execution and creation environments. The service broker product class provides an efficient and cost effective means to manage application connectivity, application-to-network interaction and application orchestration across the service layer.

While the emergence of the service broker product category may be new, the concept and underlying need has been building for some time. The service broker origin can be found in the 3GPP definition of the Service Capability Interaction Manager (SCIM). The definition has recently been enhanced and expanded to deal with the various converging network and converging application challenges Tier 1 service providers are facing.

The 3GPP expanded interpretation, combined with a couple of other market factors, has led to the current momentum behind the service broker. The ongoing need to address the complexity of the evolving network has brought service providers to the realization that there must be an alternative to the traditional siloed, niche connectivity and interworking models. The combined forces of the current economic reality, the competitive landscape and the need to drive down costs, leverage existing resources and increase revenue have caused additional momentum behind the service broker solution.

The reality is that what was once the promise of an all IMS NGN has given way to the reality that the next network will continue to be more of a hybrid, leveraging old, current and new resources going forward. As my sixth grade social studies teacher always said, “The only constant is change,” so goes the ongoing network evolution. It’s best to be prepared to manage the change by leveraging the service broker to take advantage of yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s resources.

Wally Beck is senior director of marketing for AppTrigger Inc., where he is responsible for the company’s partner program and channel marketing efforts on a worldwide basis. An accomplished marketing and sales operations professional with more than 20 years of experience within the telecom networking and service provider space, he has served in key marketing and sales operations roles at Cisco, Extreme Networks and Sprint. Beck holds an undergraduate degree in business from Southern Methodist University and a master’s degree in business from the University of Kansas.