Most vendors realize that they need to do more than simply release a softswitch and say, ?Here it is!? Service providers are moving beyond wanting a switching engine that will save them money. They want applications that they can plug in to offer new features and generate additional revenue.

?I think the starting point is very much the competitive landscape that service providers are operating in,? says Andy Randall, VP of Marketing at Metaswitch. ?We obviously see telcos moving into the IPTV space, trying to differentiate themselves from cable companies, and cable companies moving into telephony. You see the portal guys, the Googles of the world, introducing services that increasingly make them look like a telecom provider.?The common thread is all these common carriers are looking to differentiate their services.? What platforms can we put in place to be nimble??

Most vendors realize that they need to do more than simply release a softswitch and say, ?Here it is!? Service providers are moving beyond wanting a switching engine that will save them money. They want applications that they can plug in to offer new features and generate additional revenue.

?I think the starting point is very much the competitive landscape that service providers are operating in,? says Andy Randall, VP of Marketing at Metaswitch. ?We obviously see telcos moving into the IPTV space, trying to differentiate themselves from cable companies, and cable companies moving into telephony. You see the portal guys, the Googles of the world, introducing services that increasingly make them look like a telecom provider.?The common thread is all these common carriers are looking to differentiate their services.? What platforms can we put in place to be nimble??

Randall points to the ?revolution? of AIN in the network Softswitches as driving the pace of innovation. Carriers can?t spend two years developing and introducing new services because they don?t know what?s going to be successful. ?Look at SMS and ring tones, for example,? Randall says. ?No one knew they would be successful. You have to be able to innovate, to try things out, change things quickly.?

Martin Taylor, VP of Product Management and Technology Strategy at MetaSwitch, points out the cost of applications development has shifted as well. In ?the old days,? applications development was so expensive, only carriers could afford to build generic applications that would appeal to a huge number of customers. ?As the cost of applications development comes down, enabled by the onslaught of Web-enabled technologies and the army of people who know how to do these types of things, we?re going to start to see applications developed for more specialized niches,? Taylor says. ?In terms of overall revenues, when you deploy lots of those applications, the overall impact upon revenue is significant.?

On the software side, MetaSwitch already supports a number of ways to facilitate third-party applications development and plans to introduce more. ?Some of this is already out there today,? says Randall. ?Open APIs we support. Some is technology under development, and you can expect some announcements about this over the coming months. We very much support the open IMS interfaces for applications servers. The ISC interface, as defined by IMS, is essentially a SIP-based protocol for developing services on a softswtich.?

Randall indicates one of the key developments in IMS for developers is the Home Subscriber Server (HSS), a common database that is available to applications that need subscriber information. In the AIN world, access to such information wasn?t convenient. IMS opens up a common infrastructure and a common set of services to allow developers access to subscriber information, authentication, authorization, and the physical location of the user.

Open APIs are nice, but supporting third parties developing applications for MetaSwitch?s softswitch is key, with open-standards hardware and Linux lending a hand. ?We have a number of customers that have developed a number of applications and services,? says Randall. ?Open-source, base protocols are the base environment.? The ecosystem is also about other customers. We have about 200 companies that are our customers. They?re on an e-mail list they use to exchange ideas about [developing new applications]. That?s one of the benefits they get from deploying a platform with as much traction as MetaSwtich?its growing user-group support around these capabilities.?

Several of MetaSwitch?s customers have developed applications and services that they are willing to sell to their peers. Edmonton, Alberta-based ThinkTel Communications has developed and deployed a range of services on top of MetaSwitch?s ?core? Class 4/5 softswitch, including hosted voice over IP, interactive voice-response (IVR) systems, voice mail, and conferencing. ?We don?t have a formal market place in terms of a trading Web site,? says Randall. ?We have an annual users forum meeting and regional events as well. Some of our customers who have developed applications on top of our platform, exhibit.?

?We?re not at a stage where everything is so standardized, where everything is so portable it can be turned into a production [environment] at a real telco,? Martin points out. ?These applications typically require some degree of adoption to [a] users?s environment. They have to be adapted to the corporate user?s approach?the back office systems, billing, integrated.? However, if an application is interesting enough, it may end up as a standard feature in a future MetaSwitch release. ?If something is broadly applicable, we may decide to take it and integrate it into our capabilities,? says Randall. ?We have worked with our customers, taken some of what they?ve developed, and enhanced it. I think over the next year or two, you?ll see more of this happen as we enable service creation.?

The future, as they say, is pretty bright. ?I think the next five years are going to be some of the most exciting in telecom,? says Randall.

MetaSwitch?s recently announced conference server stands as an example of the convergence of telecom architecture with offthe- shelf hardware unencumbered by TDM interfaces and not requiring DSPs or custom parts. ?Having worked in this area for many, many years, it?s kind of mind-blowing,? Randall says. ?It points to what could be possible when we really start moving that frontier forward.?

Third Party, Yes. Interoperability, Better.

Sonus Networks (www.sonusnetworks.com) appreciates the need for independent developers. ?We certainly see the ability of third-party developers to work on applications as one of the real driving forces for the VoIP environment,? says Tom Phelan, Principal Architect. ?To that end, we have the IMX applications server and APIs. We have even made the source code to [IMX] open source.?

Sonus has recently refocused its marketing efforts, dedicating resources under the categories of trunking networks, access networks, wireless networks, and applications. The IMX applications server is envisioned as a vertical market ?attacker? that allows the company to spread out of trunking and into other markets. Third-party developers have been involved with adding features with delivery of data to mobile phones and other devices, as well as working on fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) applications. ?The IMX release gets us more applications,? says Phelan.

However, there are a lot of applications and services that Sonus has to ?play well with.? Making sure everything works together with other vendor products is taking up a lot of Sonus? time. ?There?s a lot of what is in VoIP today that is not that interoperable,? says Phelan. ?There?s a lot of [implementation] choices; [vendors have] made choices in different ways.? Often, Sonus finds itself playing the role of de facto integrator in ?a lot? of situations with major network service providSoftswitches ers. ?We have to get together with a wide variety of third-party manufacturers on a contract,? says Phelan.

Enter University of New Hampshire (UNH), a neutral third party that Sonus works with to ensure that SIP-based thirdparty products and services can be certified for interoperability. UNH operates a dedicated InterOperability Lab (IOL) to conduct extensive testing on everything from customer premise equipment to voice mail and various applications servers. ?All those traditional ?in the network? applications so we can deliver an integrated full-service solution,? says Phelan.

SIP Is Not SIP

As a part of the ecosystem around softswitches, DIGITALK (www.digitalk.com) provides a service-delivery platform for delivering applications into service networks. ?The main change for DIGITALK over the past three to four years is larger customers are now delivering services over softwitches,? says Mark Ashdown, Director at DIGITALK. ?This creates opportunities for us.? Most softswitches are weak on the applications side.?

With 11 years of experience watching the migration from a TDM to an IP/SIP world and 400 global customers, DIGITALK has seen its share of interoperability and lack thereof. ?What?s even more interesting over moving to a softswitch from the Class 4 TDM switch is that the whole advent of SIP has helped interoperability,? Ashdown states. ?SIP does vary from vendor to vendor, but the implementation is stronger than the INAP (Intelligent Network Application Protocol) interface.? Where I personally find it a bit perverse, some people are using INAP in a next-generation architecture description. We need to be talking about SIP.?

Interfacing with SIP has been a great leap forward, but with some caveats. ?We do see quirks in how softswitches work [in implementing SIP],? Ashdown says. ?There are differences.? There are variations.? Ashdown praises Sonus? interoperability program and notes his company was quietly working with at least three other softswitch vendors to test and certify interoperability.

On the other hand, interoperability and playing well together is as much driven by customer desire as it is by a simple statement of compatibility. ?These things only come about when they?re driven by a customer,? says Ashdown. ?With Tier 1 vendors, sometimes it can be more difficult to get into their interoperability programs. What will always wake a vendor up is if there?s a customer opportunity, to be honest.?

It is also important for customers to be able to do what they need to once DIGITALK is up and running. ?We develop our apps in house. We are open standards; all our network interfaces are SIP; all of our applications are on top of an SQL database,? says Ashdown. ?We give full access to our customers anyhow. They can drop DIGITALK into their network to get to revenues in a very rapid and short timeframe. If they wish to perform integration into third-party systems, it?s very simple for them to do.?

For the future, DIGITALK is looking at adding a DIAMETER interface, but current customers are more than happy to use the suite of applications provided today, including prepaid callingcard services, IP Centrex, and MVNO capability. Ashdown also says the company is looking at a move into the SME market with an IP Centrex offering.

Feeding the Ecosystem

For Cantata Technology (www.cantata.com), third-party development is its bread and butter. ?We sell enabling technologies across the board,? says Harold Klett, VP of Product Management. ?An ecosystem of third-party developers is key to service creation from our standpoint.?

Cantata Technology, established in 2006 through the combination of Brooktrout Technology and Excel Switching Corporation, provides a range of communications hardware and software for the creation and delivery of IP-based communications applications, including fax, voice and video messaging, unified communications, IVR, conferencing, and IP Centrex.

?We run the gamut,? says Klett. ?We provide media gateway technology, converged systems, the media-server technology, and the fax technology. We?re the underlying technology to enable the overall service piece to that.? BEA, Oracle, and Ubiquity Software utilize Cantata?s technology to deploy the services that enable softswitch vendors to add more applications. ?We?re a component; we?re a member of an ecosystem,? says Klett. ?We?re a part of that community.?

Cantata counts more than 400 partners that use its hardware and software for applications and service delivery, using standards-based tools such as VoiceXML and CCXML as well as APIs to access functions. ?We?re enabling that ecosystem of partners to develop applications and furthermore, as that evolves into IP, combinatorial services,? states Klett. ?What do I mean by that? Combining services that may be data, may be voice. Basically, using the underlying translation to IP to allow multiple services to come together to give you ubiquitous services to access.?

Klett points out?and others in the industry support him?that since the basic infrastructure is in place, services and requirements are now blending, so carriers now want to bundle service offerings for businesses, including fax.

?The fax space itself is actually growing,? Klett states. ?A lot of that is driven by Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPPA regulation. What people thought about fax is now document management solutions. There?s a demand in that domain for traditional fax. There?s also the transition from fax from the TDM space to the IP space. There?s a lot of uptake there. Fax is one of the things that has to transit the network; it is core to a lot of businesses. You see providers providing bundled services to the enterprise and even to the home office. They?d like to provide both fax and voice over their broadband pipe?basically offer it as additional service over their broadband pipe.?

Doug Mohney can be reached at dmohney@vonmag.com.