Recently Sonus Networks, one of the world’s best-known suppliers of service provider IP voice infrastructure solutions, released Version 2 of its IMX Multimedia Applications Platform, which helps IP-enable wireless, video and various other multimedia services.

 

Already deployed in North American and Japanese networks, the Sonus IMX Application Platform is a Web-based multimedia environment that combines Internet and telephony application models, enabling wireline and wireless service providers to rapidly develop, integrate, launch, and manage enhanced telecom applications and services in a highly scalable, standards-based platform. With its ability to integrate seamlessly with a service provider’s wireline or wireless network, the IMX 2.0 facilitates the development of new revenue-generating applications, improves time to market, and streamlines the delivery of existing or third-party next-generation services.

 

John Nye, Vice President and General Manager for Applications at Sonus, says, “My area is essentially a line of business focused on our SIP app server platform and related activities.”

 

“I joined the company in May 2007 to focus on the applications line of business,” says Nye. “I came from Ubiquity, where I ran the product management and product marketing group there and left a few months after the Avaya (News - Alert) acquisition to join Sonus. The charter of my group is two fold: to build out the functionality and capabilities of IMX platform — which is essentially a SIP application server in terms of generic industry terminology — and also to work in partnership with our customers to build applications on top of the platform. So that’s the fundamental mission.”

 

“IMX and its 2.0 version is, as I said, essentially a SIP app server,” says Nye, “within the context of an IMS architecture that functions as both a run-time environment for enhanced services applications as well as a service creation environment. So we have a full suite of tools that you can use in the form of a sort of Eclipse plug-in that will allow you to use drag-and-drop and menu commands to build call flows for services, as well as a more granular SIP server API to support development at that level.”

 

Service providers traditionally delivered new services through separate, stand-alone “siloed” applications tailored to handle the requirements of each service, which resulted in higher operating costs because of the multiplicity of networks and their associated management systems and staff. But by using the IMX 2.0 Application Platform with Sonus’ IMS Solution, service providers can now bring about a truly converged network.

 

“Supplemental to the core platform, we’ve also built a number of applications, both product and prototype,” says Nye. “The general availability product offering we have is a fixed/mobile convergence application that supports voice call continuity in a dual-mode handset environment, and that’s heading into its 2.0 release in the next few months.”

 

“We’ve also built a number of really interesting reference applications and prototypes,” says Nye, “and some of which will actually become productized over the course of the next six to eight months or so. Some of the reference apps we will actually ship with the 2.0 product to provide a sort of base point for customers that want to build their own apps, so that they can see how it’s done and see what the call flows look like. These are things that are oriented toward VoIP services that would be delivered through a Web GUI. To give you an example of some of these things, we’ve done a blast dial-type application, where you pick from a Web-based contact list and set up a blast dial for recorded messages. We also have a whole ‘white list’ capability for either mobile phones or second phone lines, so you can inject parental controls into those types of services.”

 

“We’ve also done an interesting interactive advertising app for a dining guide,” says Nye. “Of course, you could substitute ‘restaurants’ with ‘real estate’ or any number of other types of retail offerings where you can approach a public display that will give you an interactive set of menus to look at and choose from, such as those relating to restaurants, and set up direct connections with the restaurant. You could take the same concept and apply it to other industries. So that’s a neat idea because it gives carriers an opportunity to examine different business models.”

 

“Furthermore, we’ve started to build out some prototypes that are pretty compelling and are likely to head into productization,” says Nye, “things such as what’s essentially an any-to-any messaging gateway, that allows you to connect from an IM client, for example, to an SMS client to a voicemail box or an email box and essentially the system itself would recognize, based on the user’s preferences, where to send the message. Thus, we basically eliminate all of the need for multiple silos of messaging technology. That’s something I think is likely to gain some traction in the coming year.”

 

“We’re also doing some things concerning the whole notion of blending services, and the whole service broker function that I think we’ll talk more about as we move into the future,” says Nye.

 

“Because the IMX is highly programmable and applications and even call flows can be built quite quickly,” says Nye, “we actually use it in certain environments to bridge the gap between different systems that have different interpretations of SIP, for example, and require one SIP header versus another.”

 

The IMX Application Platform’s Service Creation Environment (SCE), combined with its capabilities to enable a service broker application, should boost service providers’ ability to create, integrate, and deploy wireline and wireless applications as part of their 3GPP IMS-compliant network architecture.