In today's market, service providers aim to ever increase the time-to-market of new and enhanced services in a cost-conscious manner. As a consequence, the need arises for existing OSS/BSS infrastructure components to adapt in an ever increasing pace. This affects not only OSS applications themselves, but also increasingly their integration. An integration strategy build upon standards and common off-the-shelf (COTS) middleware presents a solution to this challenge.

Today, there is a growing demand for automation of business processes at service providers, especially in the area of network/service operations to improve operational efficiency. This leads to the need for improved integration of operational support systems. The integration of Trouble Ticketing and Work Order systems with other OSS components, such as Fault Management, Change Management and Service Management systems is a common demand from various service providers.

Most of the existing integrations between Trouble Ticketing systems and other OSS systems are based on proprietary point-to-point interfaces although vendors offer “standard” interfaces such as SNMP, CORBA, etc., which are adapted to their applications. In a real integration scenario these interfaces need a lot of customization to fulfill the business requirements and to allow the communication between different proprietary OSS systems because each of these applications follow its own business process, internal logic and semantic. Usually application A needs to know a part of the business logic of system B (and vice versa) to be able to implement the interface. This situation ends with the implementation of very specific interfaces with dependencies on the integrated OSS systems. This means, re-use of interfaces or dedicated parts of the interfaces in other integration scenarios is not possible. So, there is a need for a standardized interface, which delivers the semantic connectivity and not only the underlying transport mechanisms, which helps to provide out-of-the-box interoperability and more flexible integration.

Implementation of a standardized, re-useable “Trouble Ticket Integration solution” which offers a standard Trouble Ticketing Interface for the integration with other Operational Support Systems (OSS) acting as clients to the Trouble Ticketing (server) system.