Concept
With the convergence movement towards IP of the
telecom industry, giving someone a voice call has stopped being
something you can only experience using a telephony device, be it a
landline or a mobile phone. Indeed, software such as Skype allows you to
give a call using your computer with a microphone and headset. This has
been allowed by the adoption of IP, which made the interface to telecom
systems more open and the development of Voice over IP (VoIP).
Now,
a similar movement affects the telecom services industry, and features
such as voicemail, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or Automatic Call
Distribution (ACD) stop being deployed as blackboxes in the network
connected through dedicated interfaces and are now developed and
deployed on top of generic computer systems connected via IP as an
application or service provided by telecoms operators. Telecom
Service as Applications and Communications as a Service (CaaS) lower the barrier to entering this market, so potentially new actors
can tackle established telecom providers.
Trajectory
In
the past years, telecom services connected to the network using VoIP
protocols have been developed by many actors in a specific and dedicated
way. Service developers based their software on plain protocol stacks.
Recently, technologies similar to Java EJB or servlet that can be
applied to the telecom world have gained maturity, with major actors
like Sun, Jboss, or BEA proposing application servers implementing them.
The emergence of open source software dedicated to telecom (application
servers, VoIP platforms) and of new programming languages applying web
development paradigms to the telecommunication world will allow the
emergence of new actors which may compete with some of today’s major
telecom providers.
| UBIQUITOUS AND PERVASIVE COMPUTING >> |
Email