E-Markets and Services

Service and Application Development Platforms Enhance SP Offerings

The challenge service providers face is a way to seamlessly integrate new services into their existing operations systems in order to realize profits and be able to efficiently deliver these new offerings.

A variety of approaches are now being taken by a slew of vendors focusing on the service and application creation market.

The key to the platforms being developed by these vendors is to enable SPs to quickly create new, profit-making services and tie those into the OSS and other back office systems so the services can be provisioned, measured and billed without manual intervention.

By true definition, service creation is the ability of users and SPs to dynamically define, deliver, manage and profit from network services. What is needed for service creation architecture is an open, nonproprietary interface for application development; a distributed architecture for ease of programmability and deployment; the ability to dynamically rate, allocate and measure service selection; a marketing front end to "push" services to the customer and "pull" service selection from the customer; and automated service provisioning and billing.

"The argument of if there [are] more data or voice packets is moot," says Emre Önder, co-founder and vice president of marketing for Pelago Networks Inc. (www.pelagonet.com). "What [SPs] need to concentrate on is the service that customers will want to buy."

Önder says that while there has been a lot of talk about so-called service creation, most of what currently exists is only designed to allow for subscriber self-provisioning. But Pelago has created "a new category of products ... the original meaning of service creation," he adds.

In late May, Pelago plans to introduce its Calypso product family, which includes a programmable service switch, service sreation environment (SCE), management suite and subscriber self-provisioning. Pricing of the product line will be announced at SUPERCOMM.

"We're trying to be a catalyst to really change the basis of competition in this industry," says Önder. "We have the ability to help SPs create new revenue streams."

Pelago intends to accomplish that through an open Java-based, visual SCE with comprehensive libraries for application feature development, testing, and ancillary software for provisioning, management and billing integration.

The Calypso products can be combined into existing network, service and OSS infrastructures to avoid costly forklifts of existing systems. The products integrate into circuit-switched/IN and IP/ATM infrastructure and support a variety of networking and signaling protocols, Pelago says.

From Day 1 of commercial availability, Pelago will offer a set of turnkey services through the Calypso family, önder says. These will come in three bundles: end office services (e.g., 911, local number portability), Class 5 services (e.g., Caller ID), and enhanced business services (e.g., voice VPNs, abbreviated dialing across multiple sites over a packet network).

The SCE will also enable the development of other enhanced services, such as messaging and notification (e.g., unified messaging, instant messaging, news alerts), personal call and contact management (e.g., follow me, voice activated dialing, intelligent call screening), and business and group-level services (e.g., account codes, bandwidth use reporting).

Ellacoya Networks Inc. (www.ellacoya.com) also sees the benefits of blending the service creation and back-office systems. At SUPERCOMM, the company will demonstrate, with an as-yet unnamed strategic partner, the functionality of its operating software and hardware to provide automated, subscription service management that will enable instant click and subscribe services with real-time delivery and billing. Included in that is the ability to automatically create a user account, service activation and service termination in both the billing system and in the Service Generation System platform, with real-time usage billing and invoice presentation.

Other equipment vendors, such as net.com (www.net.com) and Mockingbird Networks (www.mockingbirdnetworks.com), are adding to their product families to enable more flexibility in creating and delivering new applications.

net.com, formerly Network Equipment Techno- logies Inc., is announcing two new products that are part of its SCREAM Service Creation Manager product family: the SCREAM50 and the SCREAM100.

"We enable competitive differentiation through the rapid creation and delivery of services," says Craig Forbes, vice president of marketing for net.com. "Part of that component of keeping those customers is dynamically creating new services and doing that quickly."

The SCREAM product line integrates broadband aggregation, ATM switch and high-touch IP services in a single platform. It includes a bidirectional open programming interface (OPI) that allows providers or third-party developers to create new service applications directly without reliance on equipment manufacturers.

Among the unique features of the SCREAM platform is the fact that the data plane and control plane are physically separate, says Forbes. The control plane is a standard Sun Solaris platform, which runs policy, protocols, subscriber profiles and routing intelligence.

"The control plane sits on top of the data plane and lets different ISPs offer different services over the same network," says Forbes.

The SCREAM platform--both the SCREAM50 and SCREAM100--have been designed to scale for a 2.5gbps backplane capacity to 160gbps. net.com designed each card to stand alone as a total switch solution that doesn't depend on any other card in the chassis, enabling SCREAM to instantly reroute traffic from one card to another and not leave a single point of failure.

At SUPERCOMM, Mockingbird Networks will be announcing its media services gateway and enhanced services softswitch. The products, says John Chun, vice president of marketing, will be in beta at the beginning of June and commercially available in the third quarter.

"The problem we're solving is that our customer revenues are plummeting, and they need to find new value-added services to sell to customers," says Chun. "What our vision has been is all about delivering web-based enhanced services."

Another vendor seeking to help SPs in their quest to create applications that will draw in new customers and revenue streams is NexTone Communications Inc. (www.nextone.com). At SUPERCOMM, NexTone will be showing what it calls a "new framework" for application creation.

"We're building an infrastructure that service providers can use to develop applications," says Dan Dearing, NexTone's vice president of marketing.

The architecture comprises the already announced application controller and media server. The third component to be added is client software, which will serve as the user interface.

NexTone will divide its booth in half to showcase its technology and some actual applications enabled by the platform.

"You can see applications based on presence and on the other side is a look behind the scenes," says Dearing. "You can take a walking tour of how the user might use it and how the service provider would build it."

NexTone will also feature in its booth contributions of its current partners, such as Cognitronics Corp. (www.cognitronics.com), Convedia (www.convedia.com), IPVerse (www.ipverse.com), Tellabs Inc. (www.tellabs.com) and other partners on the media server and CPE sides that will be announced just prior to the show.

The idea of presence, as mentioned by Dearing, is a key to many new service creation platforms.

Sylantro Systems Corp. (www.sylantro.com) plans to announce a remote instant office function to its existing managed telephony suite of services, which already include ComCierge, ComTraveler and ComMerchant.

"The idea behind remote office is the beginning of presence management," says Laura Thompson, vice president of marketing at Sylantro. It allows you to "indicate to the system where you're registered in the network, and then you get capabilities you traditionally expect out of the office from wherever you are."

The remote office addition, called ComRIO, extends Sylantro's overall mobility strategy, which was started with its ComTraveler offering.

Users are able to go online from wherever they are, and register their location on the network without requiring software downloads or other complicated network configuration.

"It really supports the notion of single number capability and gives you the ability to do things you would at the office from elsewhere," says Thompson. "This is something that we believe service providers will be able to charge extra to provide."

The remote office element also helps protect personal privacy in that when someone calls out from his or her remote location, that person's office phone number is what pops up in caller ID rather than the number of the phone from which they're physically calling.

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