The Eurescom workshop “XML Web Services for the telecom market” took place at the Eurescom Conference Centre in Heidelberg from 24-25 June 2003. It attracted 70 attendees, who represented network operators, manufacturers, software vendors, solution providers, and academia. In an exhibition area, several vendors and network operators were showing their latest developments and trial results.

The objective of the workshop was to explore and discuss the potential of XML Web Services for telecommunications and to show example applications implemented in experiments and trials.

Web Services is currently one of the hottest issues in the software industry. This is not surprising, because Web Services have the potential to repeat the success of the Internet. In the world of Web Services, one software application can dynamically discover a number of others over the Internet, and by using their compound functionality a new service can be created.  

In a keynote, IONA’s chief corporate scientist Seán Baker gave an example scenario for a global telco: “One customer service application involves 32 different applications, partly custom built and partly built by third-parties. There are 4 different types of middleware employed on 4 hardware platforms, using the programming languages Java, C and C++.” Baker explained that for the interworking of the service components Web Services could help by providing a technology-neutral format for messages, which appears to be accepted by most vendors.

Thomas Hoppe of T-Systems presented an analysis of telcos’ business models for Web Services , summarising results from Eurescom project P1209. They include brokerage of Web Services, the provisioning of content services including content integration from different sources, and finally the provision of supporting infrastructural services for Web Service providers, including security, authentication, billing and payment services. Hoppe also concluded that a market for commercial Web Services is currently not visible yet, which is also due to the still immature state of the technology. He explained that a market survey done by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in 2002 revealed that 83 percent of the respondents expect that the needed standards will be available within 2 to 4 years. However, other presentations showed that Web Services are already beginning to be applied in areas like Parlay for the access to telecoms networks, or for secure authentication in the Liberty Alliance framework.

 
Thomas Hoppe: "A market for commercial Web Services is currently not visible yet."

The results of the technical experiments in P1209 were summarised by Dave Milham of BT Exact. He said that the interoperability of the used products was generally good in spite of some compatibility issues around data format and types. This shows that the basic Web Service specifications are mature, but what is still missing are unified orchestration and process definition specifications. Sune Jakobsson of Telenor explained that also security is still a big concern when using Web Services, as they are not detected and filtered by any traditional firewall. There is work going on in various approaches to overcome this issue, e.g. with XML signature, XML encryption or Public Key encryption.

In a presentation about Web Services in mobile telecommunications, Andreas Fasbender of Ericsson explained that the media industry starts to discover the mobile channel. In this context, network operators could become a service layer provider for content providers, offering services like, for example, sales & distribution, charging, presence & location or content adaptation. Under the title “Leveraging the 'C' in 'ICT' through XML Web Services” Marc Jadoul from Alcatel presented a local transport application. A prototype had already been implemented in the city of Bordeaux. Through this application a local transport company offers their customers information on how to get from their current location to their destination, showing the way to the nearest bus stop including a timetable and fare all on the customers mobile phone. For building this application Web Services were used to integrate functional components at the involved bus company, telco, bank, and geographic data provider.

 
Marc Jadoul presenting a Local Transport Information application implemented with Web Services

For this presentation, Marc Jadoul received the ‘Best speaker’ award. The other presentations, however, were also highly rated: The workshop participants expressed their great satisfaction with the quality of the workshop via feedback forms and personal feedback.

For those who missed the event, there is a CD available with audio/video streams and pdf files of the workshop presentations. Details are available at www.eurescom.de/XML-WebServices.