The new digital world services challenge

The digital ecosystem is rapidly evolving to include communications among smart devices, networks of people, businesses, and service platforms. Digital services and next‑generation value‑added services (VAS) from communications service providers (CSPs) are increasingly driven by emerging principles, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile web real time, and consumerization of telecom networks and IT.

The digital world is driven by interactions generated by events coming from multiple channels, within an application context. Organizations and developers are faced with the complexity of modelling these interactions and processing large sets of incoming data events from multiple sources in real time.

Addressing the digital economy challenges

The HPE Smart Interaction Server (HPE SIS) provides a complete easy‑to‑use visual designer to rapidly create multichannel real‑time interaction services and a powerful run‑time engine to manage and execute these interactions among millions of people, things, and applications through the concept of “smart digital conversations.”

HPE Smart Interaction ServerDesign and run real-time interaction-oriented applications and conversational services

Data sheet

HPE Smart Interaction Server: Real‑time contextual interactions and application designer for digital services made easy

• Rapid development of interaction‑oriented applications as a composition of reusable services available on the HPE SIS Catalog

• Enable applications to “interact with everything”—Apps and APIs, digital users, things, cloud services

• Unlock new revenues from across multiple channels digital life services (including IoT), leveraging context‑based interactions

• Transform the customer and employee engagement through multichannel, context aware conversations

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With HPE SIS, a communication service provider can:

• Connect users and applications with millions of devices, using multiple interaction channels.

• Sense digital presence across multiple resources and abstract typical IoT apps siloed technologies.

• Bridge interactions among people, devices, and applications across multiple channels and resources (bidirectional messaging, asynchronous information queries and reliable, guaranteed notifications).

• Set up and capture activity streams to create reactive data sources and drive reactive, in‑session, state‑driven actions.

• Simplify real‑time back‑end interaction while allowing developers to focus on creating engaging user experiences.

• Design service data model, interactions, microservices, and create a catalog of reusable components.

• Implement new real‑time applications.

As the business demands increased services velocity, HPE SIS provides the ability to turn good ideas into marketable features quickly, while addressing the concerns of all parts of the organization:

• Line of business owners want to create innovative new offerings targeted at digital users and expect a new platform to provide significantly better support for frequent and rapid application development.

• Application developers desire an easy‑to‑use tool that will allow them to focus on the end‑user experience so they don’t need to rebuild service capability each time.

• Service developers want to focus on interactions and back‑end services, test locally, and reduce deployment risk by reusing components.

• Network and IT operations demand full integration with telecom and IT platforms and needs to simplify the operations support while providing high quality of services.

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Use the HPE SIS, ignite your digital services economy

The HPE SIS provides the following benefits to the different constituents of service provider and enterprise organizations:

Generate revenues from new digital life services, leveraging context‑based interactions with presence, messaging, and personal network for smart interaction services HPE SIS enables an unlimited set of new digital services, leveraging real‑time information and in‑session interactions across people and things. It applies to various industry verticals and the consumer environment, placing the HPE SIS customer at the center of the value chain for brand new business models.

Create compelling user experiences and responses across new organizing verticals and digital channels HPE SIS exchanges in‑session activity and data in real time, drives contextual immediacy through actions, and improves intimacy as people and things converse across new digital channels.

User responses are used and measured in real time, enabling CSP marketing to create new applications, and continuously improve products and services across new verticals (such as IoT, next‑generation VAS and OSS), resulting in increased service uptake and revenues.

Enable quick creation of innovative services exploiting advanced interactions with web services and telco capabilities Powerful services can be developed by exploiting web services to enrich telco capabilities and offering telco capabilities to the web community. HPE SIS manages interactions with end users on the real‑time web channel (REST HTTP, WebSockets) and triggers contextual application logic. HPE SIS also provides the visual designer and application environment for the creation of cross channel contextual interactive applications.

Significantly reduce the time to develop and scale interactive applications With HPE SIS, application developers can focus on the end‑user experience and rapidly create multichannel real‑time interactive applications. The HPE SIS contains a rich catalog of microservices, which can be easily chained to create application services. Developers do not have to recreate time‑consuming tasks such as security, rules, domain objects, and back‑end connectivity management thus allowing rapid creation of services.

Monetize existing assets and APIs with new interactions channels HPE SIS boosts the leverage and monetization of customer assets and APIs through new applications and a new way to enable interactions across multiple digital channels. For example, HPE SIS can be used to push information to an end‑user smartphone app about a device changing state, activities in a factory, a home door left open, or kids returning home. HPE SIS proposes to create new applications by taking appropriate state‑driven actions, depending on the person and associated resources.

Stimulate business ecosystem and revenues from placements Knowing presence status and real‑time context brings the opportunity for contextual immediacy and intimacy. It is all about contextual relevance and reach—understanding the user presence on the right resource and pushing the right placement to the right person at the right time. The value of such placement can be increased by more than five times compared to standard digital advertising. In addition to this, the HPE SIS delivers contextual intelligence and analytics about user interaction with the placement content. The ecosystem boost generated by this smart placement opportunity is made easy to manage through HPE SIS business APIs. This stimulates partner ecosystem and advertisers with a new simple real‑time context, rich push communication channel, bringing real‑time interactions, security, service‑level agreements (SLAs), and measurable outcomes.

Improve customer and employee engagementLeverage the HPE SIS’ abilities to expose an application logic to multiple channels and to maintain the conversation context in order to provide an omnichannel conversation experience to customers and employees.

HPE SIS enables services from different technologies and sources (Telco, Cloud, OTT services) to seamlessly interact together in an easy, efficient, and secure manner. Here are a few examples:

Smart homes: Send an SMS when garage door is open longer than 10 minutes when subscriber is not home.

Omnichannel engagement: Expose services/applications to multiple interaction channels and ensure context continuity when hopping across channels.

Book nearest taxicab: Acquire driver location, enable driver selection, deliver message and set up a call session between taxi driver and subscriber.

Smart cities: With smart parking application, find parking spaces quicker. Increase luminosity of street lighting when emergency equipment is in the area.

Smart advertising placement: Provide real‑time customized ads and recommendations based on subscriber profile and in‑session actions. Multiplacements include smartphone, tablet, PC, TV, vending machine, taxi screen, connected car, and more.

Context and profile aware ads: Ads are pushed in the WebRTC browser window at app activation, during call setup and/ or on call end.

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HPE Smart Integration Server block diagram shown in Figure 1 defines two main capabilities:

• The Smart Integration Designer: An application enablement environment for the rapid creation of multichannel real‑time interactions services

• The Smart Interaction Engine: A run‑time environment that executes applications for digital services in an automated manner for millions of people, things, and applications

Digital usersDigital users are a virtual representation of a type of physical entity such as a person (human end user), connected object/thing, or external application (that exhibits well known behavior and state). These virtual objects are application‑specific domain objects represented as RESTful resources with extensible properties and their own Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The identity for a user can be created on a specific resource and across different resources (mobile apps, smart devices, and devices). A personal network of people, devices, and applications can have built‑in privacy controls and permissions for “who can interact with what.” Especially valuable is the ability to sense real‑time presence of the user across resources associated with the user (mobile apps, smart devices, and devices).

DevelopersDevelopers will be creating interactions‑oriented applications using the HPE SIS based on their skill and needs. Service developers are typically focused on horizontal microservices. Application developers are focused on industry specific vertical microservices as a part of creating interaction‑oriented applications.

Smart Interaction Designer—Design interactive applications and taxonomiesA key component of the HPE SIS is the Smart Interaction Designer, a web‑based visual Designer to rapidly design context aware value‑added services. The Designer is easy to use and consists of a modeler, a catalog, and a composition editor. Typically, developers use the Modeler to design application taxonomies of business objects on connected things, places and end‑user identities enriched with contextual information. These entities are automatically available in the Catalog as RESTful microservices.

Modeler

Catalog

Composer

Smart Interaction Designer

Smart Interaction Engine

Smart Interaction Server

Servicedevelopers

Industry vertical microservices

Horizontal microservices

Processing framework

Datastores

Interaction channels

Digital users

Applicationdevelopers

Figure 1. HPE SIS environment

Review key HPE SIS features

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The Catalog allows developers to add new microservices through a simple drag‑and‑drop wizard style interface. Typical microservices are libraries, algorithms, data sets, technical services, and wrappers of existing business services. Supported programming languages include Java, Python, R, and JavaScript.

All services in the catalog share a consistent compositional interface, and through the Composition Editor, developers can visually chain microservices to create hybrid application services. The created service chains and catalog components go through a defined lifecycle before they can be published and made available for runtime execution.

Figure 2. HPE SIS Catalog

Figure 3. HPE SIS Composition Editor

Example of an application built as composition of services from the HPE SIS Catalog: Smart car rain application service

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Microservices back ends follow a typical lifecycle approach—create, compose, describe, review, test, publish, and version control as part of the lifecycle of the microservice.

Smart Interaction EngineThe Smart Interaction Engine executes context aware value‑added services (VAS) both on the server side (enabling automatic, “real‑time” actions being triggered by contextual events) and the client side.

The Smart Interaction Engine can seamlessly interact in real time with end users using the concept of smart digital conversations—data interactions where context is preserved in session, as opposed to traditional SOA or REST services. Services are accessible from end‑user apps using a web‑based JS cross‑platform SDK. All interactions with the end user are based on REST and real‑time web protocols—secure WebSockets, XMPP over WebSockets, Bidirectional‑streams Over Synchronous HTTP (BOSH). For example, a mobile application could use the SDK to interact with a service created using HPE SIS that on the other hand is conversing with “things” associated with the end user. The necessary context and authorization information for this conversation is maintained at the central application engine across interaction engines and channels. In this way, vertical microservices can be used to trigger contextual real‑time actions, triggered in a state‑aware or stateless manner based on activity streams from end users and things—an “if this activity then that task” pattern. HPE SIS also supports bots execution invoking back‑end horizontal services in a scheduled manner, or on demand. All of the above interactions are protected using security techniques such as API keys for authentication, smart keys and OAuth for authorization.

Horizontal microservices are a class of microservices that provide specific purpose reusable business and technical functions that can be used by various vertical microservices and work across various interaction‑oriented applications. Horizontal microservices are added to the catalog using an easy drag/drop web wizard interface and are automatically available for use in new services chains/flows (compositions). Examples of horizontal services are service wrappers for network services such as messaging and call control, algorithms and utility functions, IoT platforms, IT macro systems, telco Big Data and analytics capabilities, content and media functions, and cloud and mobile service platforms.

Application developers focused on defining industry specific vertical microservices use the Modeler to create an interaction‑oriented application that is consumed as a set of vertical microservices. These higher order microservices are implemented within interaction‑oriented applications as a purpose overlay on top of the above horizontal microservices. Using our vertical microservices catalog, application developers can discover suitable vertical microservices, test them via the website on their own data to verify efficacy, and then add the vertical microservices to their applications. Examples of vertical microservices are representative application taxonomies for connected car, smart city (smart parking, smart waste disposal, and smart environment), smart home, digital assistant, taxi service, smart campaign, and smart customer care amongst others.

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Interaction channels are protocols through which digital users send activity streams and protocols used by the interaction engine to interact with the digital users. An activity stream represents an activity of a virtual object over a specific interaction channel. Representative examples are a connected car sending its navigation and infotainment activity, sensor activity in a smart home, person in proximity to a point of interest and more. A typical activity stream representation is W3C Activity Streams 2.0, oneM2M notifications, GSMA OneAPI third‑party call notifications.

Microservices are accessible from end‑user apps using a web‑based JS cross‑platform SDK. All interactions with the end user are based on REST and real‑time web protocols—secure WebSockets, XMPP over WebSockets, Bidirectional‑streams Over Synchronous HTTP (BOSH).

Rely on HPE expertise

HPE SIS implements an open, highly scalable federated platform for mobile, web, and IoT real‑time interactions and applications. It offers the key differentiators you need to become a bigger factor in the digital life economy. Smart interactions among people, devices, and applications enable an “everything goes social” environment for plenty of innovative services. New business models and a boost to quality of experience bring revenue increase and significant churn reduction.

HPE has years of experience and success on digital services enablement with Tier 1 operators in every geography. We offer an extensive set of use cases for digital services enablement, developed and delivered as a combination of product and solution offers through Big Data, network exposure, mobility, machine‑to‑machine (M2M), and IoT.

With the combined value of HPE expertise and products, we can offer an end‑to‑end value proposition for any challenge your business faces. By combining HPE SIS with HPE API Management products and solutions, we can help you realize new revenue streams, present an opportunity to establish your own OTT offers, or collaborate with OTT players. We also can provide tools needed to better understand your users for a vastly improved customer experience.

HPE provides the ability to simplify business with partners, build a developer community, satisfy your subscribers, and boost your revenues with applications and APIs.

HPE API Management products and solutions• HPE Service Governance Framework

(HPE SGF)—securely expose, manage, and govern network and third‑party resources access. With the optional HPE SGF Partner Relationship Management (HPE PRM), provide a partner and developer portal for easy and secured API leverage.

• HPE Service Orchestration Manager (HPE SOM)—Orchestrate services with business rules, mash‑ups creation, and a callable decision engine.

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Table 1. Additional HPE SIS features

Data sheet

© Copyright 2015–2016, 2019 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates. All other third‑party marks are property of their respective owners.

4AA5‑7453ENW, June 2019, Rev. 3

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Real-time Data Exchange • Sessions are containers for enabling real‑time digital conversations between authenticated and authorized actors

• Messages are conversational data constructs used for secure in‑session, bidirectional data exchange (one‑to‑one, one‑to‑many, and publish‑subscribe) between users and resources

• Information queries are conversational data constructs used for secure in‑session, bidirectional data exchange (one‑to‑one asynchronous request query for information and get response as content becomes available) between own and known digital users, resources, and across multichannel and multiapplications

• Activity streams are conversational data constructs used for secure in‑session, bidirectional data exchange of user activity streams (publish‑subscribe) between own and known digital users, resources, and across multichannel and multiapplications

Real-time Data Actions • Model activity streams from people, devices, and applications as reactive data sources

• Flexible and simple way to implement reactive computations and take actions, as data streams are exchanged in session and in real time

• Typical examples are understanding state transitions and triggering actions (such as alarms, new messages, and notifications), pushing activity streams through a fire hose, pushing activity streams to web applications for real‑time visualization, and pushing activity streams to a temporal rule engine and storing as time series data

Deployment Models • On‑premises

• Cloud

• Virtualized or on physical HPE industry standard blade servers

Scalability • Highly scalable—scale up and out to manage millions of concurrent conversations among people, devices, and applications

• Client server—client developers focus on user experience; server developers focus on reliability and scalability—decentralized, federated, and robust (no single point of failure)

• Load balanced and highly available

Security • API keys based authentication and authorization

• Contextual smart keys (what, where, and when) for authorizing access to virtual objects and data exchange between virtual objects and with service platforms

• Channel encryption and authentication, strong transport and protocol level security (TLS, XMPP, WebSockets)

• Message compression and encryption

• Harder‑to‑spoof choice of protocol, such as SMPP allows for no multiple hops

Operations • Integration to fault and performance management platforms using standard SNMP

• Custom extensions for API‑driven service management

Supported Protocols • XMPP over WebSockets, WebSockets, REST (HTTP with HATEOAS support), HTTPS