Service Provider Featured Article

When the telephone was first introduced to the world, no one really knew what to do with it or how to use it. There was certainly a mixture of ideas — but it was such a radical new invention that even the brightest of minds struggled to understand its place in society. There were no “obvious” uses and there was no critical mass.  It was a “discontinuous” innovation that was not compatible with current communications methodology or approach. 

 

The telegraph was already in place and growing at an accelerated pace, making replacement unappealing and competition difficult. History tells us that, sometime in the fall of 1876–1877, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, Alexander Graham Bell’s future father-in-law and a partner in Bell’s telephone venture, offered to sell all the rights to the telephone patent to Western Union (News - Alert) for $100,000.  He was turned down. William Orton, President of Western Union at the time said, “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?”

 

More than 100 years later, our hindsight is incisive and we see that what he turned down was the right to a monopoly for all electrical communications that lasted for more than a decade. It is speculated that Orton turned down the offer due to the fact that he would have to replace his telegraph infrastructure with more expensive telephone equipment and no real application. After all, there were already more than 200 submarine cables laid and Western Union was making a fortune from telegraphy. Why move to the telephone that wasn’t available to most of the world, didn’t leave a permanent record like telegraphy, and was unlikely to find its way into households? 

 

There are many analogies that can be drawn from the marketing challenge Alexander Graham Bell and his colleagues faced so many years ago to today’s ever evolving network and search for “killer applications.” For the past several years, there has been a lot of hype in telecommunications around IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert)). Less than 12 years ago, we saw the same level of excitement around the Intelligent Network (IN). 

 

Today, trying to make sense of it all has resulted in a marketplace that is confused and becoming cynical. The complexities of trying to keep all the services tied into the network presents a huge challenge for service providers, much less trying to keep all the vendors communicating and on the same page.   Fundamentally, one needs to recognize that the network is continuously evolving and will continue to do so. As such, networks will always be made up of a hybrid of technologies. Newer technologies are introduced and integrated into the network to provide users with faster and more economical services paving the way for a breadth of new, “cool” applications.

 

As the network evolves however, it does so often at the expense of applications. Any time a change is made in the network architecture or technology, there is a potential impact to existing applications. This is especially seen when the network evolves from the legacy TDM network to IP or 3G, 3.5G, WiFi (News - Alert), WiMax, or other emerging technologies. The combination of new technologies becomes “the network” and vendors that want to participate in what it has to offer are forced to manage through a plethora of protocols, network triggers, media types, “hybrid standards,” and the like. The applications that were once optimized for a particular network type, are no longer relevant in the new network, leaving service providers with a big problem. 

 

The changes in protocols between network types strand applications and do not allow service provider to capture their full ROI. Negotiating with all of the VAS application providers each time there is a change in the network leaves them with no leverage in terms of network evolution to meet market demand. Network architects, in conjunction with the application vendors have responded by either re-writing the application or “re-stitching” it to the new network (perpetuating the silo), or by adding “dumb” expensive gateways into the network to patch a solution together. 

 

Neither option has proven to be optimal. Rewriting an application each time a change is made to the network is not only time consuming, but expensive and inefficient. Furthermore, general purpose gateways simply do not have enough intelligence to function in the network for the purpose of keeping applications in synch with the network. The result is slow and costly deployment of new services and huge operating expenses managing the lifecycles of the many gateways that find their way into the network.

 

There is a credible solution to this problem in a new network element called an Application Session Controller (ASC (News - Alert)). Architecturally, the ASC sits above the core network and just below the application layer. It is an intelligent, call state device that was purpose built to solve the problem of keeping applications relevant to the network as the network evolves. It enables legacy applications to be brought into the new IP networks without compromise, and new applications to be made available to legacy networks — old to new and new to old.

 

The ASC insulates the application server farm from the network via a programmable network abstraction engine, thereby providing the application specific call control functions independent of each network. It incorporates a number of open standard APIs, plus the signaling, media, and the feature interworking between disparate networks that converged and consolidated applications require. It is scalable to support tens of millions of subscribers via a single system or via clustering and provides the necessary calls per second/transactions per second required for large-scale multi-network environments.

 

With the AppTrigger Ignite Application Session Controller, service providers developing and deploying traditional voice or next generation applications achieve dramatic increases in performance while significantly reducing their product development costs and time-to-market.  This makes AppTrigger’s Ignite Application Session Controller ideal for application delivery for emerging and legacy network infrastructures. Applications once “plugged into” the ASC through one of the many interface APIs (Web services, SIP, Parlay X, ccXML, VXML, etc.) remain relevant to the network as it changes and evolves.

 

The ASC has been deployed successfully in many Tier 1 service providers (early adopters and innovators) over the past few years. Service providers are becoming more aware of the problems they have in managing applications into the network and have recognized that there is a better solution than re-writing applications or dumping more gateways into the network. The cost to get a new service deployed into the market is several millions of dollars and often takes longer than a year to deploy. This is clearly not a sustainable model. The pace of the market calls for “now marketing” and delivery — end users won’t wait for services, and with number portability, will change services providers overnight. Obviously, this creates additional competition and intense pressure to get services to market sooner. 

 

In 1960 Theodore Levitt wrote an article called Marketing Myopia. Effectively, he said the companies that succeed will be customer-oriented, not product-oriented. Since the Department of Justice’ Consent Decree that broke up AT&T (News - Alert), competition in the telco space has gotten better and customer marketing has been accelerated. Yet, getting product to market remains challenging at best. Everyday that a gateway device sits in the network, it is being made obsolete and new services are not getting deployed on time. 

 

Going back to our history lesson, it has not gone unnoticed that markets have a tendency to resist the introduction of new products — especially, new products that disrupt the status quo. Introducing an ASC into the market is disruptive — it is, after all, a discontinuous innovation, meaning it’s not a simple upgrade to a general purpose gateway device. It combines media with rich call control, signaling, and softswitch capabilities into a “purpose built” solution that was designed to get applications to market quicker and preserve legacy technologies, while enabling service providers to evolve their network technologies.

 

In today’s environment, dealing with disruptive technologies is a constant. Alexander Bell wrote about his vision for the phone — itself disruptive technology — in a letter in 1878. He wrote:

 

It is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be laid underground, or suspended overhead, communicating by branch wires with private dwellings, country houses, shops, manufactories, etc., etc. uniting them through the main cable with a central office where the wire could be connected as desired, establishing direct communication between any two places in the city.

 

His persistence at what he envisioned as the need for a new element to communicate inspired him to persevere through the competing telegraph and enlighten others to his vision. There are many parallels for us today. Application Session Controllers — the vision is right, the technology is here, and the market is ready. Equilibrium in the market is being disrupted and critical market mass is being generated. Sound familiar?