On the changing face of service composition in telecom

With the emergence of converged networks, Telecom operators are looking at composing Telecom functionality with 3rd party offerings to provide rich, innovative value-added services to their customers. In parallel, Internet Content providers like Google and Yahoo are rapidly moving towards adopting Web 2.0 technologies to enable a variety of end-user applications, and making them accessible to Telecom customers as well. This provides strong competition to similar paid-for services exposed on the Telecom portal. Telecom operators have recently started inspecting their service composition practises to see how it might be possible to exploit a Web 2.0 environment for rapid service creation. In this paper, we take a deeper look into service composition in a converged Web 2.0 Telecom ecosystem, consisting of Telecom functionality, 3rd party offerings and several categories of developers and users. We also propose a generic model for Telecom services in this ecosystem. Thereafter, we critically evaluate various existing service composition efforts for Telecom. Finally, we identify some open challenges and propose insights to address them.