Standards Watch : Parlay Expedites Use of Web Services
Susana Schwartz
05/01/2004
At its inception, the Parlay standard was touted as key for operators wishing to open up day-to-day operations to third parties in the drive to increase revenues. That initial hope was somewhat lost in the hype around Parlay’s heavy reliance on implementation of CORBA (common object request broker architecture) for security and call control. “CORBA/IIOP [Internet inter-orb protocol] was a pretty heavy interface,” says Mark LeClerc, chairman of Parlay’s marketing work group. To assuage those concerns, Parlay specs are being created over Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The spec will offer the same throttling (call and data volume control) and security capabilities as before but now over a “lighter interface” designed to be user friendly. To demonstrate Parlay’s newfound strength for value-add and Web services, there have been several CORBA interoperability events.
“Approximately 80 Parlay applications came out of the latest 3GSM conference—75 of which are being trialed right now,” says Zygmunt Lozinski, president of The Parlay Group.
Because Parlay X and Parlay Web Services are picking up so much momentum, he says the Parlay Group will push ahead with enhancements and finalize technical work and review for technical accuracy for version 2.0 in the next six months.
As a result, the creation of Parlay X 2.0 and Parlay Web services for second-level abstraction are creating a huge surge in testing and announcements. Just last year, the U.S. was lagging behind Europe and Asia, as British Telecom and Korea Telecom were leading with Parlay launches. But this year, Sprint PCS joined the mix with an announcement that it will launch Web services using Parlay. Other operators are beginning trials, such as Net4Call, a Norwegian company implementing televoting using Parlay in order to create services around reality shows. Others, such as Brasil Telecom, are also in trials.
At a meeting in London a few months ago, 90 percent of about 1,000 developers that write for mobile operator O2 (a brand of mmO2, formerly BT Cell Net) signed up to use Parlay X for location APIs for third-party services. “The application developers see the potential of applications like StarFinder and StarSearch,” says Bohdan Zabawskyj, CTO of RedKnee, referring to services where subscribers notify alert services over SMS whenever celebrities are spotted. RedKnee implemented location gateways into mmO2’s network with Parlay X APIs. With more than 16 million subscribers, the mmO2 roll out was significant proof of Parlay X’s utility. “It helped us create an abstract layer in relation to the telecom network, so we could open the core APIs,” adds Zabawskyj.
Because Parlay enables that capability to invoke a function off the handset, larger ASPs are doing wholesale location dips to O2’s mmO2 network for value-add brokering of those services. By enabling third-party developers onto the their network, O2 has opened the floodgates, as thousands of developers have signed up to create location-based services for them.
If carriers get into charging for look-ups and dips with location-enabled applications, carriers can make money whenever APIs are invoked—both for consumer applications, like the star-sighting service, as well as fleet management applications where maintenance, employee schedules and locations can be known through SMS messages. Additionally, subsequent revenues are garnered when other services, such as air time, generate an event.
There are some small companies looking at Parlay Web services to possibly replace wireline services. Small businesses could potentially run on mobile phones, as Parlay’s newest applications services include presence and availability. “Applications could be written to allow individual members of a company to see and track their associates; should one be on the phone or in a meeting, a receptionist could then forward a potential client to another associate in the same group,” says Lozinski.
Policy management has also been added for applications requiring the provisioning of VPNs.
That, along with the presence and availability services—which will be available in the next six months with Parlay X 2.0—have been added to the existing carrier application services to which third parties could subscribe: connectivity management, account management, user interaction, mobility management, data session control, policy management, present and availability, terminal capabilities, framework, call control and content-based charging.
“The first wave of trials are underway, as companies test Parlay X for enhanced core management applications, such as number translation or televoting with radio or television,” says Lozinski. He says others are testing it for hybrid applications, such as combining functions of Parlay with other delivery channels, like SMS. “That would enable subscribers to be proactively notified that they missed a call and from whom, while the phone was shut off.” That can, of course, translate into an increase in call-return rates and generate revenue for operators. Looking to the not-so-distant future, some Parlay developers are looking at creating personalized Web pages that would come up on subscribers’ phones. “That can be pushed for consumer vanity services, or in the business world, for new advertising channels,” says Lozinski. Such “phone pages” could open up enhanced revenue in business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer applications.
“There is no doubt for us that Web services will be the way of the future,” says Zabawskyj, who notices that all the RFPs received the past six months have had absolute requests for open API capabilities. He says group carriers like Orange or KPN will use Parlay for group-centric Web services, giving carrier-specific attributes to the underlying capabilities of the network.
Because of the increasing IT investment in Web services, the push to produce common tools is picking up.
The concept of having a common framework and set of gateways, servers and applications that could unify IP and IT is causing tremendous consolidation, as evidenced by many announcements around joint alliances. For one, the PAM (presence and availability management) Forum joined forces with the Parlay Group. Then there was a closing of the ranks between 3GPP and 3GPP2, as well as the formation of groups like the Open Mobile Alliance through which leading manufacturers Nokia, Siemens and Ericsson consolidated efforts to set standards for IP multimedia services. And, just recently, Parlay and OSA (Open Service Access) have announced they are working together to develop APIs under an OSA/Parlay concept intended to facilitate better design of key network elements for third parties. Under the agreement, the OSA will add a front-end interface with open APIs to Parlay. That will allow applications providers and service providers to exploit network elements in a controlled manner—the benefit of which is the expedited creation of value-added services without granular knowledge of underlying networks.
As a result, carriers can sell access to an OSA/Parlay gateway, against which a partner’s application could run, using the intelligent network, while the signaling system remains in the hands of its core network people.
With all of these groups working to interface openly using Parlay, the same application can be used with different infrastructures—a key to companies that want to grow quickly with fast service launches using existing infrastructure.
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