Cognition 2.0

MTOSI is TM Forum's standard for providing integration models and patterns between Vendors, Technologies, and Systems. MTOSI stands for Multi-Technology Operations System Interface. Although the standard hinges on the requirement to integrate systems, particularly those that are part of Telecom companies, the requirement can be extended to provide separation of concerns within one and the same OSS application.

Separation of concerns is an architectural pattern that is widely used to ensure that systems don't collide in requirements, functionality, and data. Systems that are part of an ecosystem, such as the multitude of applications that are in operation at any given time in a telecom carrier's environment, are required to do so by following certain architectural principles and best practices. Some of these principles that provide stability and ease of maintenance are related to making the environment as simple and predictable as possible. In order to achieve that, it is important that system boundaries don't intersect, and if they were to intersect they would need to follow strict rules as to which information is mastered by which system or to the way synchronization is supposed to take place. This delineation of responsibilities requires the information to be segregated into segments that are "mastered" by the different participants in the ecosystem. This is what defines the separation of concerns.

Separation of concerns is also a driver for other important improvements within an IT ecosystem, namely the ability to design services around the different "concerns", i.e. the masters of information. Services are mostly an architectural pattern that allows for "atomic" units of work to be published in a network or collaboration system. These services expose standard interfaces that can be discovered by consumers. The entire ecosystem is then composes of consumers and producers that interact over a shared "pipe" or "bus".

As such, we have now two main ingredients: Separation of concerns and Service Bus. In this context, both can be combined into a MTOSI-compliant Enterprise Service Bus, which will enable:

• The establishment and deployment of a Services Ecosystem
• An MTOSI-compliant vocabulary to describe and process messages pertaining to telecom-related resources
• Partitioning of functions and processes based on specific MTOSI use cases and model components
• Service Syndication across Carriers and Service Providers implementing a MTOSI-compliant Service Bus

Furthermore, by implementing separation of concerns within an information ecosystem, and even within an application itself, it is possible to distribute the processing load among processors. Parallel processing within one and the same application becomes a significant performance-enhancing option, as well as an IT resource optimization pattern that can be combined with virtualization technologies and multi-threading to both save on server costs and support transparent upgrade and scalability of systems based on performance requirements.