SID V9 and V9.5

Sorry about the long silence. I am very busy working away on a major NGOSS based OSS/BSS refresh project in Ankara Turkey as the SID Data Architect.

I attended (listened to) the TMForum’s teleconference yesterday (23rd June 2010) where John Wilmes and John Reilly talked about the recently released Frameworx and SID Version 9 and the upcoming SID v9.5.

The key topics of the Conference Call were

1. Business Services
2. SID V9 changes
3. SID V9.5 proposed changes

Business Services have been introduced to show how Level 4 processes in eTOM use SID Level 1 ABEs, something that has been missing from NGOSS/Frameworx from the beginning. I think this will help in SOA Service developments, but I reserve my judgement as SID Level 1 ABEs are very high level concepts and may be too high level to be useful.

It wasn’t clear to me during the conference whether the Business Services were in SID, as a new set of classes, or were new external modelling concepts that just used SID ABEs. I asked a question along those lines and John Reilly answered that they were external to SID – at least that’s what I think he said.

SID V9 changes are predominantly brought about by aligning with and consuming the concepts from MTOSI (TMF608). Again I have to withhold my judgement on this until I’ve had a look at the SID V9 in detail, but it does worry me. Previous alignments had done odd things to the SID like making Software Applications a form of Service, when logically to me (and no pun intended) they are Logical Resources. The other change is that SID V9 does not use Rational Rose anymore; it now is supported by Rational Software Modeller. Quite what that means to those of us, including me, who use neither (I use Sparx Enterprise Architect) is not yet clear.

For me the most interesting discussions were around what is in SID V9.5 which is due to be released in Q4 2010. Several concepts new to SID, but not to me are being introduced for the first time including: “User” – presumably the user of an Application making up the Enterprise and “Subscriber” the user of a Product and its “Customer” Facing Services. I always call this concept “End User” as the name “Subscriber” is “So last century”. I wonder if they are now going to rename Customer Facing Services to “Subscriber Facing Services”?

Other useful, and long needed elements are a Customer Payment ABE and a more detailed Product Pricing structure which is supposed to be a lot easier to use than the current Policy structures.

Given the introduction of the Product Pricing and Business Service I had to have a dig at John Reilly and asked my second question about the horrible overly complex Policy and Contract ABEs asking if they would be removed from SID. John R. unfortunately said that they wouldn’t, and that Policy was being extended to cover a new Enterprise Domain ABE called Security brought in from the USA DoD, by all accounts.

I don’t know whether you have looked at the Contract ABE in SID v8. It isn’t what you would expect. The Contract ABE models the contracts between services on an ESB bus rather than the “Business Contract” between the Telco and the Customer which is still mired in the Business Interaction and Policy ABEs.

Quite why SID models Service Contracts a puzzle to me. Surely that is just too recursive to be useful to anyone. The SID only has real use, apart from being an academic exercise when it is used as the structure or “language” for messages being passed between Services in a SOA based ESB. So why would you want to pass messages over the ESB about the ESB? Especially when industry standard messaging tools like Oracle’s SOA Suite and Tibco already do this automatically for you. It is a bit like modelling the entities Table, Column, Index etc. in an Oracle database – these are already present and don’t require modelling.

Anyway, that’s a very brief overview of what was said. I’ll include a link to the PDF of the seminar material when the TMF put it on their website.