Open APIs and interface specifications are the lifeblood of the computing and telecom
industries. Open doesn't always mean that anyone can affect its definition. Open
does mean that anyone can see the specifications and build products that follow
them.
Over the years, our industry has created mountains of specifications using various
standards bodies and activities. Often, these standards bodies solve the same problems
repeatedly with only minor differences from other specifications or standards. Equally
as often, the amended specifications take a long time to reach stability, and often
follow the market that they were intended to stimulate.
Ulticom, like many in the telecom industry, has spent years building products that
conform to many of these standards and their national and vendor-specific variants.
Ulticom will continue to track the many emerging standards and updates and will
continue to update our Signalware® product families to make sure that our customers
have products that conform to the very latest versions of the relevant specifications.
In addition, Ulticom is now engaging with a select set of partners to create standards
of a different kind. Once interfaces between telecom network elements were described
only as messages, fields, bits, and state-machines. Now, there is a growing industry
trend to define such interfaces using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Ulticom is at the forefront of this activity.
The Parlay Working Group has
chosen this method to define the interaction between value-added services and the
supporting telecom network - an area traditionally addressed using messages, bits
and bytes. Likewise, the
JAIN™ Working Group is creating a formidable toolkit of components
for telecom applications that are all described using Java-based API technology.
Interface definitions must meet the demands of industry for faster time to market
and high margins and they must be easy to understand and implement. Open APIs appear
to have the best set of attributes to meet these needs. Ulticom is working hard
to make sure they create and use the open APIs and standards that make their customers
profitable.