Mashing up Telephony without protection?

Now it's time for mashing up Telephony services in the same way as Web 2.0 has revolutionized the creation of web sites. One thing I've learned the last year is that the killer application for telco operators are not any specific application or service. It's rather the possibility to introduce new services fast to market which are short lived or have a small target audience. What Cris Anderson calls "The Long Tail" where selling less of more is the key.


In the Internet domain that means the ability to fast create new sites reusing existing services in new unique combinations and possible a few new services as well. This is called Mashups. Telco's needs to be able to do Mashups to gain the fast-time-to-market they are longing for. One of the main building blocks when creating a new service using Mashup is to reuse existing services, and then WebServices are the most important service building block. Hey, wait a minute, are you saying I should open up my network to anyone who wants to create a service reusing my telco service? I'm not going to do that !!!!



What is needed to allow basically the whole world to use existing telco services to Innovate new services through Mashup is a safe and secure way exposing these services in a standard way. Once that is done these services needs to be secured and have policy control to enforce the Service Level Agreements offered by the operator. Finally we need to actually connect to the network otherwise not much is gained ... although without connection it will be quite safe ;-)


I once read a report from Heavy Reading claiming that 80% of the telco services will be accessed through WebServices. I believe those services will be used in different kinds of Mashups or whatever you would like to call them. At least Mashups are one way of utilizing the webservices exposed and after all this entry is about mashing up telephony.



Which technologies are out there allowing easy exposure of telco services as WebServices enabling quick and secure Innovation of new services in a standard based way? To me the only standard available out there today is ParlayX. I know OMA once tried to do it, but so far I have not seen any major releases from them in this topic.



Who can then expose these services as ParlayX webservices and provide both powerful policy protection and network connectivity? To my knowledge it is only BEA who has the needed solution with a large market attraction with live deployments in all continents. Our WebLogic Network Gatekeeper performs all of these features in a scalable, secure, performant way. After all I work for BEA ... ;-)


Why am I bringing up this topic of Network Gatekeeper here? Since I wanted to highlight a few of the services that won the Telephony Mashup contest I wanted to show you what is needed to actually do Telephony Mashup for real. No telco operator is going to let anyone access their network without proper security and policy protection.



Which services of the winning ones are the best? Why should any be the best? Didn't we agree on that the future is more of less? Shouldn't all services be deployed and having customers decide which deliver the best value? Yes! So I will not have any thoughts of which service is going to win in the market place, it's up to the users. But I still see quite some interesting trends in the type of services reaching the higher positions. The common topic is text-to-speech or other forms of using the voice as control instead of typing numbers on the key pad. Which service can you create with access to basic Internet services like Google, Netflix and YouTube in combination with call, location and messaging from the telco world?



As we say at BEA: We enable Innovation through our inventions. This means that we create technologies and then the community use them to innovate new exciting combinations. Or to be extremely honest, the community creates the standard, we implement it in the best way and combine different community technologies to create something new. As we did with Network Gatekeeper where we combined ParlayX, WebServices, and JEE and created a really cool exposure and policy protection entity that can be used in SOA type of architectures to allow, among others, Telephony Mashup.



My personal favorite after all in the winner category is the SMS GeoBlogging Service from BT. They have basically implemented the Virtual Air concept from Ian Pearson using technologies available today. Which Telephony Mashups do you like? Look at Telephony Mashup Finalists