Converged Creation Platforms

AIN-Like Systems Promise Rapid Applications Development and Delivery

Next Generation Class 5 Software

Make open software development tools and network interfaces available to everyone and some college student named Marc Andreesen will invent the graphical browser, found Netscape Communications Corp., Mountain View, Calif., scare Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash. out of complacency and transform the Internet into a World Wide Web of graphical pages, streaming media and commercial transactions that is just beginning to unfold in multimedia glory.

Hopes are rising that this same open systems computing model is poised to similarly ignite innovation and remake the world's telecommunications networks in the Internet's image.

This transformation gained traction earlier this year with a new class of computer server-based telephony softswitch that promises to use standard programming interfaces and to undercut the capital and operating costs of monolithic and proprietary mainframe telephone switches by a factor of 20.

Softswitch proponents now include Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, N.J.; Salix Technologies Inc., Gaithersburg, Md.; Sonus Networks Inc., Westford, Mass.; Taqua Systems Inc., Centerville, Mass.; and Burlington, Mass.-based Unisphere Solutions Inc.

Now, as the year ends, stage two is arriving in the form of new, enhanced services creation and hosting platforms.

Like existing advanced intelligent network (AIN) systems that host and administer sophisticated call control services such as 800 number translation, inside the public switched telephone network (PSTN), the new enhanced services systems assume service creation and service control technologies should run on easily programmable, general purpose application server hardware, independently from slow-to-change, hard-to-reconfigure telephone switching hardware.

Reaching further, the new enhanced services players want to support applications that can control not only telephony switches, but also data networking hardware, including routers, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) gateways, remote access servers (RASs) and end user integrated access devices (IADs).

Consequently, these platforms could provide a home for creating and hosting enhanced features for combined voice and data services. A service designed to block anonymous phone calls, for example, might also reject anonymous electronic mail.

"Existing switches can have hundreds of features," says Pedro Colaco, director of IP telephony for Unisphere, which will unveil its Service Ready Server-3000 softswitch during the first week of December. "So the only way to catch up with all that engineering and to enable the engineering of new convergence applications is to open the new platforms to all developers, some of which will concentrate on local calling features, some on long distance, some on e-mail and messaging, to cover the gamut."

The ultimate goal, in the words of enhanced service development platform maker Digital Telecommunications Inc. (DTI), Boca Raton, Fla., is to enable developers to "create and maintain services with the same ease that people publish and maintain web pages."

According to Voorhees, N.J.-based industry consultant CIMI Corp., the worldwide custom calling and advanced voice services market surpassed $20 billion this year and will triple over the next five years.

Indeed, says Ron Nash, marketing vice president for DTI, incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) already make more profits from custom calling than from all public and private data network services combined.

Such projections suggest an increasingly heated race to deliver differentiated, added-value services. "Transport is about containing costs, but you can only get so far in containing costs," Nash says. "Services are about increasing revenue."

In pitching its own BroadWorks service creation suite, due out in the first quarter of next year, BroadSoft Inc., Gaithersburg, Md., emphasizes the near impossibility of bringing new services to market rapidly under the current enhanced feature regime. "In the old voice-only model, it has taken typically two years and $5 million to develop new switch functions directly on the switch, and even with AIN, it takes one year and $1 million to develop a new service," says BroadSoft President, CEO and cofounder Michael Tessler, who adds that AIN implementations also remain less than fully independent from each brand of central office (CO) switch hardware.

In contrast, BroadSoft vows to reduce service development to one month and $50,000, and to run on any switch without modification.

"Those low up-front costs will, for the first time, give service providers the ability to target and capture multiple niche markets," based on the ability to economically customize applications for each type of business, Tessler says. "That will be a healthy contrast to the current environment of being able to cost-justify development of only mass market applications."

Other companies emerging at this service-creation layer above the softswitches include IPeria Inc., Burlington, Mass.; ipVerse Inc., Mountain View, Calif.; and VocalData Inc., Richardson, Texas.

Softswitch makers plan to provide services and features resident on their switches.

Indeed, a key advantage of the distributed softswitch model is that applications can run at locations most appropriate to their design. Some applications, such as voice activated dialing, require actually listening to the traffic, and so naturally must run at the switch, while other applications, such as follow-me, can operate on servers away from the actual traffic lanes.

For very large-scale, Class 4 trunking applications, a switch must listen constantly for "call state knowledge for up to 50,000 calls at once, which is too much to do for general purpose server software," says Michael Rubin, senior product line manager for Sonus. "To support 1 million call attempts per busy hour would require very powerful software."

Consequently, for custom features, Sonus' Open Services Architecture will support interworking with third-party softswitches like Lucent's (Sonus and Lucent were selected earlier this fall to provide next-generation packet telephony networks to Frontier Communications Inc., Rochester, N.Y.), but for basic features, Sonus will perform call processing at every port of its switch hardware, and it will host a basic set of calling services on its own PSX 6000 softswitch.

Salix proposes a similar approach, supporting a distributed creation and hosting architecture. "You may want to run services with a high number of activations closer to the subscriber, while services that require complex database lookups might run farther away," says Ken McInerney, director of product marketing for Salix.

To support that flexibility and encourage innovation, softswitch makers say they will provide provisioning protocols and/or applications program interfaces (APIs) to third-party developers and enhanced service creation platform providers like BroadSoft. Those protocols and interfaces will allow the third parties to leverage the functions and resources of the switch.

Sonus' Open Services Partner Alliance, launched last June, for example, offers published APIs, comprehensive developer tools, testing and support services, technology exchanges and co-marketing activities to technology vendor and service provider partners.

Starting at $50,000, the Taqua Open Compact Exchange (OCX) Class 5/4 softswitch (due next March) will come complete with more than a dozen of the most popular Class 5 calling features, such as call forwarding, call waiting and caller ID.

According to Taqua President and CEO Dave Michaud, service providers and customers will be able to use Taqua's ISEflow point-and-click interface to combine and recombine application components, or software objects, to create and activate new services. To design a calling card service, for example, a provider could click on and string together a series of objects: "Collect Digits," "Query Routing Rules Database," "Route to Recorded Announcement," "Accept Additional Digits," "Query Call Treatment Database," "Route to That Destination," "Send to Billing."

However, Taqua's Telephony Toolbox also will allow service providers and other third parties to turn off any of the switch's native software functions and to control the switching hardware using alternative back-office or service creation programs. According to Michaud, Taqua's "Dynamic APIs" go beyond providing developer interfaces to the application layer to allow access to any software layer and provide flexibility across or between software layers.

Along with softswitch makers, the enhanced service creation software providers propose a new network services architecture that is similar to the hardware and software layers inside of a personal computer. In PCs, an application uses control drivers as interfaces to the operating system, which in turn accesses the capabilities of the microprocessor hardware underneath. In essence, an application drills down through control and operating layers to make the hardware do things.

In a similar fashion, BroadSoft's Enhanced Services Layer architecture provides three layers that operate above switching, routing, access and other network hardware: (1) an applications layer where applications are hosted in the form of reusable and combinable application modules, (2) a control layer, which manages interaction between application modules and the interface layer, and (3) the interface layer, which is comprised of modules designed to access specific resources such as interactive voice response devices.

At the applications layer, BroadWorks is designed to enable developers to mix and match application modules to create new services. One service provider might combine anonymous call-rejection, deluxe call log and time-of-day routing application modules to develop a Do Not Disturb voice service, while another provider might add an electronic mail module to that same set of modules, thereby creating a Do Not Disturb voice and e-mail service.

Also packaged into each applications module are data and logic for service execution, provisioning and billing, which removes the need for developers to recode complex back-office processes for every new service they design.

The overall enhanced services layer will speak down to the call control layer of a particular network through an enhanced service protocol (ESP) to control call processing, redirect calls, release calls and the like. According to Tessler, BroadSoft is working with others to standardize the ESP in the Softswitch Consortium, a voluntary industry organization formed earlier this year to develop interoperable platforms.

The combining and recombining of application modules can be done via a standard web browser interface, enabling service providers, their customers and third parties opportunities to design services without having special knowledge of switch, router or any other hardware operations.

Indeed, earlier this fall, BroadSoft partnered with IAD maker Merlot Communications Inc., Bethel, Conn., to offer small and medium-sized businesses the ability to create their own services, a process involving browser-based access to centrally stored ServicePage scripts developed using the Internet Engineering Task Force's eXtensible markup language (XML).

Theoretically, all this open programming and third-party access to network resources could enable service providers to offer web-based storefronts in which customers can buy, tailor and provision services themselves.

Toward that end, DTI also is leveraging XML to create its own call policy markup language (CPML), which, in turn, provides the application scripting tools at the heart of DTI's Extensible Service Policy system. "The system uses CPML to define service features independent of any particular switch or other hardware," says DTI's Nash. "These are descriptions that can be read by machines and by human users, including human service editors. There are lots of XML writers out there, and service providers can learn it quickly too."

Service editing could extend all the way to the customer. For example, a small-business owner might wish to program his telephone service to forward calls from only certain important customers to his home office, while sending others to voice mail after 6 p.m.

"Customer lists are constantly changing, so the platform has to be flexible, and it has to be able to customize features down to the individual subscriber level," Nash says. "A customer can go to a CPML page with a graphical interface where he can enter that new customer he wants forwarded."

Described by the company as applying web technology to the tasks of defining, storing and modifying call policy information, the Extensible Service Policy platform actually may also integrate into any given service, not only CPML content, but also web page content developed in the hypertext markup language (HTML).

For example, according to Nash, the Extensible Service Policy system could program a switch to contact a web page containing a subscriber's personal calendar application to decide where to forward a call to that subscriber on a given day.

As with BroadSoft's intention to deliver a range of interface modules for a range of different network devices, DTI's Extensible Service Policy system includes service agents which act to mediate the CPML content to switches and other devices needed to deliver the service.

Services developed with Extensible Service Policy, BroadWorks or other third-party platforms may even find their way into customer premises-based access devices, such as the Intergrator IAD from Sonoma Systems Inc., Marina del Rey, Calif., which last month unveiled the xchange integrated, virtual PBX for the Integrator. That customer located system, which is owned and operated by the service provider, is designed to provide not only PBX services, but also custom calling services associated with Class 5 switching.

"Currently, CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers) wholesale custom calling services from the incumbent carrier and resell them, which is clearly not a viable model for the long run," says Heidi Brandte, vice president of corporate marketing for Sonoma. "Implemented on the IAD, the popular features like caller ID and call waiting can come under the total control of the CLEC, leaving him at the mercy of no one."

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