The OASIS Telecommunications Services Member Section (OASIS Telecom) is an open, active community committed to bringing the full advantages of SOA to the telecommunications industry. OASIS Telecom will work with other standards development organizations (SDOs) to pave the way for an exciting, new business model that makes telecommunications services more intelligent, deployable, and easy to consume.

Telecommunications and IT service providers, developers, vendors, practitioners, and researchers all collaborate within OASIS Telecom to resolve specific telecommunications-related issues within the SOA framework. Through the formation and oversight of affiliated OASIS committees, the Telecom Member Section will:

1. Collaborate to develop SOA for application to telecommunications companies

• Recognize the increasing use of SOA by telecommunications SDOs in conjunction with other technologies
• Provide SOA expertise to promote coherent and consistent application of SOA and integration into existing environments
• Draw on the knowledge and experience of other SDOs in the telecommunications industry to articulate requirements to the SOA community
• Provide one end of the bridge between telecommunications SDOs and the SOA community

2. Optimize the Web services stack for use by the telecommunications industry

• Account for the particular needs of telecommunications companies for performance, robustness, scale and change
• Ensure that efficiency and reliability can be achieved with the deployment of Web services
• Ensure that Web services capabilities support the 24 x 7 operational needs of telecoms
• Ensure that Web services provide support for change and growth within the constraints of reliability and performance

3. Develop information and data models to represent the SOA environment

• Provide a coherent model of the SOA environment aligned with the approaches taken in telecommunications standards (UML, etc.)
• Offer a bridge between the SOA information and data models and the corresponding telecommunications models
• Take advantage of the insights in information model patterns and architectures developed in the telecommunications SDOs
• Ensure that the model work carried out in OASIS is complementary with that in the telecom SDOs

4. Define mechanisms to allow identity-based services across networks and applications

• Strive to align work already in place at OASIS and in the telecommunications community on identity and naming
• Define techniques to advance the use of common identity mechanisms across telecommunications companies and applications layers by building on current identity-based protocols and solutions

The work of OASIS Telecom will help telecommunications companies achieve a homogeneous environment that spans time-sensitive and traditional IT services. By exposing the underlying value of the network to IT applications--while at the same time allowing the network to access IT services--OASIS enables telecommunications companies to redefine their role from access providers to service providers.