Service profiling in business to business web services

It is a general trend that telecommunication and information technology are converging. This development enables new business opportunities for telecom operators: they can give application developers access to telecom capabilities by offering services like SMS and MMS messaging, call control, location based services, etc. Web services are foreseen to be the dominant technology for business to business interactions over the Internet. Therefore the research starts with a state of the art overview on the large number of web services (related) specifications and standards, development and standardization, and web services initiatives in the telecom area. When a business offers a service to another business, that service is usually a process involving other services where each fulfills a part of the overall business and technical requirements. Making services using such a process is called service profiling. The main purpose of this research is to identify a suitable technique that can be used for service profiling. Four different technologies (BPEL, WSCI, Axis and a proprietary Java solution) are compared based on a set of functional and non-functional criteria. BPEL was found to be the most suitable and promising technique. A prototype of a service profiling environment using BPEL was built. That prototype showed that BPEL is indeed suitable for service profiling, but it also showed some limitations when using BPEL for this purpose. Based on that experience, a number of improvements for BPEL are suggested to overcome the limitations. It is possible that these limitations will be resolved in a future BPEL version. This report ends with the recommendation for Ericsson to watch BPEL closely as it is still in a premature phase (not suitable for telecom grade applications) but a very promising technique for service profiling in business to business web services, not only from a technical but also from a business perspective. Also, a market study needs to show if operators are willing to adopt this new approach in service offering and exact requirements need to be specified.