Advanced service creation in distributed heterogeneous environments

Important factors that will determine the success of service providers in the competitive communications market of the future are the efficiency with which the services will be developed, the "quality" of the service deployment, and the quality levels at which the services will be provided. A service creation environment (SCE) should provide the service developer with solutions to these problems. In this paper we present an SCE focusing on some essential characteristics, namely, the service creation practice underlying the operation of the SCE, and realisation in terms of existing software technologies and tools, the support of standardised service architectures.