Alcatel-Lucent took the first step in its new application development strategy today with the launch of a new service-enablement platform for Web 2.0 and other converged, personalized services.
The 8661 Directory Server is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)-based, centralized storage platform for subscriber data. The server was created by startup UnboundID Corporation. It will be distributed by Alcatel-Lucent exclusively and integrated with Alcatel-Lucent’s Data Grid to make it easier and less expensive to personalize applications. It will do so by integrating dynamic network data and events occurring on the network related to subscribers with static IP-centric data.
This technology promises to make it easier for both operators and developers to enhance mobile media, entertainment and social networking services and advertisement and productivity applications through the centralization of personal, identity, and privacy preference user information. The company says it can do so securely and in real time.
The company uses a familiar Starbucks and location scenario to describe the network’s ability to find a user and deliver relevant information, but also describes an international traveler automatically getting access to Web pages in his or her native tongue.
The directory server features a set of open APIs that the service provider can leverage to develop new services or share with third-party application developers.
“The current generation of infrastructure doesn’t really support the type of response times, throughput and transaction speeds to integrate that subscriber data with the IT applications and the network,” said Jeff Cortley, president of Alcatel-Lucent's Subscriber Data Management business, adding that existing systems must access individual subscriber databases using unique protocols or consolidate subscriber data into batches, making the data less than real time.
Cortley said there was a void in the marketplace for high-performance LDAP directories that could do the job of centralization required. So Alcatel-Lucent brought UnboundID into its lab during its development stage and found the technology orders of magnitude better than current directories. “It provides us with a strategy for a single virtual infrastructure even though the data its uses may exist in multiple data stores,” he said.
