SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE FOR THE FUTURE INFORMATION MARKET

The rapidly changing marketplace of the telecommunications industry is forcing people to rethink the technologies required to support a futu re customer base. There is a plethora of architectures and technologie s that provide solutions to certain problems. However, the unification of these into an architecture for the industry has eluded standards b odies and individual companies. The Telecommunications Information Net working Architecture Consortium (TINA-C) is defining an architecture t hat will provide such a unification. The architecture being defined by TINA-C will allow for the construction, operation and management of m any types of services, ranging from simple telephony services to sophi sticated multimedia applications. TINA-C also defines an environment i n which services can reside, including network platforms, and defines how such an environment can be managed. The provision and delivery of services, combined with the ability to manage these and the underlying resources in a unified framework, will allow for the industry to evol ve to meet future customer demand.