In a recent article by Keith Willetts in TeleManagement Forum , the importance of using a software like OHC becomes evident beyond provisioning, business features, and control panels. OHC becomes a necessary component in convergence, as the multi-purpose application glue, at a very cost-effective price, allowing service providers to reap all the accompanying benefits.

"Telecom operators need to shift from their decidedly 20th century business processes and operations if they are to survive in an increasingly hostile competitive climate.

Unless some nice Senator on Capitol Hill comes to the rescue, a shift to become a customer focused; agile; innovative and low cost "lean" operator is the only way to survive.

One of the keys to becoming a lean operator is to break down the internal process barriers that get in the way of automating as many processes as possible, including provisioning, service activation, assurance and billing."

OHC is based on an open communications environment that uses standards-based Internet and Web technologies. It accommodates both new and legacy hardware, software and network/application technologies and has been designed for simplicity and speed in design and implementation. It provides a way for developers, users and applications to reuse application components, and OHC offers access to any application or network resource at any time, from any place. Further, OHC can combine diverse application resources to deliver complex application services.

Deb Mielke, in "Migration Minus the Migraine: SOA and SIP drive application convergence" further explains the importance and necessity of convergence in the data center:

"Finally. Enterprises, service providers and even consumers are using their IP networks to combine voice, video and data transport. The problem is that although voice, data and video are using a common network infrastructure, they remain separate at the application level.

And, although service providers and their customers have enjoyed reduced network infrastructure and operational costs by merging voice, video and data transport, they have failed to realize the significant cost, productivity and product/service differentiation capabilities that converged, collaborative applications could bring.

Attempting to bring these single functions into a meaningful whole is not only incredibly difficult but also prohibitively expensive.

To make application convergence a reality, there must be multi-purpose application glue that is not only simple to apply (implement), but also works on all types of surfaces (applications) and is inexpensive and fast drying (easy).

Jeff Spagnola, vice president of service provider marketing at Cisco, believes this change will have a significant impact on service provider infrastructures. "Converged applications that enable business value have significant implications for the underlying network infrastructure," Spagnola states. "Network intelligence will continue to gain in relevance as IP convergence evolves at the application layer."

Service providers have long sought a way to make their many proprietary back office systems work together without spending millions upon millions of dollars to do it.

CORBA, DCOM, JAVA and other object-oriented remote procedure calls, Microsoft Message Queuing and other messaging architectures have all been tried and found too complex and costly. So maybe the way to prepare back office systems for interactive applications is to make SOA ... the foundation of them as well.

With SOA ... supporting service provider back office systems, service providers would be able to do more than just meet their customers' basic networking requirements while saving on operational costs: They'd also be able to deliver more services.

Enter SOA .... (It's) good for making sticky applications."