Evidence of the growing popularity of the interface is suggested by a string of recent customer wins for Northern Ireland-headquartered OSA/Parlay specialist AePONA. Customers it can name are Eircom, Sprint, Orange and KPN. One it can't is a Japanese Tier 1 carrier that is rolling out a nationwide IP network that will support, in addition to new services for IP subscribers, a subset of services for non-IP subscribers.

The first fruit of AePONA's collaboration with KPN is an in-house Internet call waiting service. This includes the option of terminating the voice connection to the user's PC via VoIP. The two companies are currently negotiating to sell the application to another major European incumbent.

OSA/Parlay derives from an initiative that kicked off in 1998 to remedy some of the limitations of the intelligent network (IN) approach to value-added service creation. It has become a fundamental building block of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), the new framework for the creation and deployment of services in IP networks. "IMS really is IN on speed - it's IN for all-IP networks", states AePONA director Joe Cunningham.

A main restriction of the traditional IN was that external, third party service developers could not create and deploy products by themselves due to security concerns about them having full access to the network signalling system. IN service development also required a level of investment in both time and money that was beyond the reach of most would-be developers.

By contrast, the existence of OSA/Parlay encourages third party service creation with the use of secure, well-defined capabilities and protocols. At the application level, abstractions provided by OSA/Parlay APIs are designed to allow solutions to be developed independently of the underlying technology. AePONA vp of customer operations Michael Curran likens OSA/Parlay to a network operating system (OS). "The telecoms infrastructure as a whole is all-digital and effectively one big computer. What we have with OSA/Parlay is this OS that allows access to any component functionality, or combination component functionality, in the network without having to know where it exists, how it works, or what the complex telecoms protocols are to get access to it", he summarises. This all has the consequence of boosting the ease and cost-effectiveness of third party service creation, making it more of an off-the-shelf proposition.

According to Cunningham, the KPN case illustrates three other ways in which OSA/Parlay has the potential to revolutionise the service creation business in the IP age. First up it allowed KPN to easily and rapidly bring its own in-house developed next-generation IN product to market for its own customers. Second, it provided the operator with a new business opportunity as an application vendor. Third, given its security and control capabilities, OSA/Parlay has encouraged KPN to open access to its network to third party 'rent-a-switch' service providers.

Yet another possibility OSA/Parlay opens up is enterprise integration - in which enterprise customers are furnished with APIs to the telecommunications network and can develop their own services. The AePONA Sprint deal - which is IBM-led - is an example of this.
John Williamson