T-Mobile gets more from SOA

Yet another SOA success story comes from T-Mobile, the high profile provider of mobile communications services. In a recent conversation with CIO Magazine, Hossein Moiin, T-Mobile International's VP of technical strategy, offers a far-reaching perspective on the results the company has realized from its SOA efforts. He explains both internal integration and reuse aspects of the strategy as well as the external, partner- and revenue-generating elements.

Moiin explains that the company designed its architecture in four planes or layers: applications, access, consumption and support. This has enabled the organization to holistically address the processes and functionalities within each of the layers necessary to provide an array of communication, information, entertainment and transactional services to end users.

Within the application plane, the company offers streaming video, video clips and voice. "Then you build those applications and combine those applications with the core capabilities of a mobile phone company, which include things like presence and location, messaging, browsing capabilities," he says. "As well as ability to charge for the thing, to build databases and data warehouses regarding the customer interaction with the ecosystem.  And not to forget, you need the right network and the right devices."

The network, he adds, "exposes in one way or another some key functionality which can be utilized by the application.  And the goal of our service-oriented architecture is to understand and articulate the capabilities of each of these planes and sub-planes in a manner that can be used by external and internal application developers, so that they don’t have to rewrite the code and reinvent the wheel." 

This approach enables T-Mobile to work effectively with third-party content providers such as Time Warner and the Bertelsmann Group to deliver services to customers. "So within this framework, what we’ve done is, we said, 'What are business processes that we need to follow?  We need to have a contract with the third party.  We need to have the right handset with our end users.  We need to have the right functionality within the networks and the supporting infrastructure.  And we capture all of this information and business processes that really are nothing more than contractual agreements, but they need to be translated and boiled down into actual services that are then delivered to the end user.'  And this is the basic idea behind our SOA."

If you're interested in a deep dive on T-Mobile's SOA efforts, I encourage you to read on. Christopher Koch does a nice job of teasing interesting perspectives out of his interviewee. Moiin, for instance, explores SOA's implications in relation to centralized vs. distributed governance and the performance-cost-control tradeoffs associated with different approaches.  As Koch notes, he puts the technology in "a business context and a strategy context."