EASP Flexibility
The EASP is fully customizable by the service provider, enabling the presentation of a totally different look and feel from customer to customer. Service providers typically want to design and offer a specific set of services without having to redesign them for every different type of customer due to varying needs and capabilities. Some enterprise customers are very technical and require the ability to provision available services within the enterprise as corporate needs and network resources change. Other enterprise customers have relatively simple needs; once the service agreements are established with the service provider, these customers need to control only subscription and activation.
The SDX software design flexibility enables service providers to offer customized versions of the same service to different customers. The customers with simple needs could be provided a static or pre-provisioned offering; at one extreme, for example, the service provider hard codes Service A to one access line with a specific traffic rate limit, Service B to a different access line with different rate limit, and so on. The more sophisticated customers get all the flexibility they need and can specify via their EASP not only how services are distributed to particular groups, locations, or networks, but how these services are customized by modifying service parameters.
The EASP can vary in appearance between these customers even though they are subscribing to the same service offerings. The EASP for the sophisticated customer has more options present, including highly customizable services and the delegation of service administration to various enterprise IT managers. The less technical customer's EASP can be simpler in appearance with very few options selectable by the enterprise IT manager; options available to the enterprise IT manager on the EASP at the more sophisticated enterprise might not be displayed to the enterprise IT manager at the less technical enterprise.
The end user, the worker in the enterprise, never sees the EASP and knows nothing about service provisioning. The whole subscription process is transparent to the end users, who know only what is available on their PCs.
You can improve the performance of service activation for the EASP by implementing the DN realm of the NIC in your network. In this case, the EASP uses the NIC to efficiently locate the SAE managing a particular session. If you do not configure a NIC for your network, the EASP locates the managing SAE by polling all the SAEs in the network.
The EASP communicates directly with the managing SAE via its CORBA external interface. In this way the EASP can: