All business support service capabilities can be considered as utility services in a service delivery platform environment. Billing is the most obvious of these utility services. When you expose existing enterprise-wide business system capabilities as services in a service delivery platform environment, they can be used by application developers to build composite applications that easily integrate with the operator's back-end environment. The business events can be generated by a standard business system to be consumed by CSF. They can also be generated within CSF for consumption by an enterprise-wide business system.

Standard Business Events

Ideally, all business applications would fit into an SOA environment (that is, all interfaces would be exposed as Web services according to SOA principles). However, this is unlikely to happen immediately. And, since the environment and the governing business rules are fairly complex, it may require a layer of abstraction when it does occur. In this context, the layer of abstraction is called Standard Business Events (SBE). These services act as a bridge between an enterprise-wide business system and the service delivery platform. In the telecommunications environment, the types of SBE are identified in the TeleManagement Forum's eTOM standards definition. The SBE's data model and schemas will conform to the Next Generation Operational Support Systems (NGOSS) SID data model definition.

Note: Types of services are applicable across industry verticals. Standards and specification adherence may change, but the concepts remain the same.