Network-Centric Service Oriented Enterprise

Corporate information is skyrocketing in business values; for enterprise, what is best practice for developing and maintaining goals and standards to enhance information management and business operations? The growing need to incorporate and exchange information across n- works has driven corporations to establish infrastructure for high-distribution communities in a timely and safe manner. Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE) is lauded as a mainstream business-information collaboration solution due to its decentralized, loosely coupled, and highly interoperable nature. Through SOE, composite applications can be created, modified, and removed in a dynamic use of services. This allows corporate information to be abstracted from existing applications and data, and creating new possibilities for assets to be either provided by external platforms or provisioned from external sources. Within a business/commercial paradigm, SOE translates to a set of flexible services and processes that an organization wishes to make available to its customers, partners, and/or associates. From a technical perspective, SOE evolves existing integration concepts into the notion of a contract – a technology-neutral and business-specific representation of the function. The history of the term network-centricity has represented different p- ceptions in the realm of enterprise services. In such traditional Information Technology (IT) domains as the telecommunications industry, networking has comprised a complex and expensive asset-management effort for service carriers. Network operators are consistently challenged to manage techno- gies and associated procedures that are continually growing and changing. Efficiency of resource management via network-centricity has widely been regarded as a cornerstone of business assurance. ix x Preface

Information Superiority.- Enabler of Information Superiority.- Wireless Network Technologies.- Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications.- Building a Wireless Transport Service.- Network and Service Monitoring.- Service Quality Management.- Integrated Information Assurance.- Service Knowledge Management.- Network-Centric Service-Oriented Enterprises.

William Y. Chang, co-author of "Service Assurance for Voice over WiFi and 3G Networks," is a founder of AcuMaestro, Inc., and has over twenty years of consulting, engineering, and development experience in telecommunications, financial, and defense industries.

Mr. Chang’s credentials reflect a career of blending leading-edge solution quality with system engineering, deep-information management, telecommunications technologies, mobile-service creation and operation, and commercial software-product development. Currently, he serves as a Lead System Integrator and Technical Consultant in the Future Combat System (FCS) Division at Boeing. His affiliations include: Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), where he was Principal Systems Engineer with the Tactical Systems and Solutions business unit; AcuMaestro, as their Chief Technology Officer; Bell Communications Research (now Telcordia), where he was the Principal Systems Engineer of the Next Generation Network OSS Engineering Group; Bell Laboratories, as a software-architecture consultant for the AT&T Customer Network Management solution and federal government network management system (FTS2000); Tandem Computer Corporation, where he provided engineering consultation for a distributed-banking solution; and Unisys Corporation, where he was a firmware engineer in the intelligent-terminal development group. He holds a Master of Arts in Computer Science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and is pursuing a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering.