There’s a revolution happening on the application creation and delivery front, and it’s allowing VoIP to move from its current position as a low-cost PSTN clone to a feature in a wide variety of communications services.

From a business perspective, this is happening because service providers increasingly need to differentiate their services to gain customers, grow revenues and control churn. From a technical perspective, this advance on the application front is happening because suppliers are providing new tools to enable service providers and developers to quickly and affordably create new applications and integrate them with the rest of the network.

Among the new tools enabling this transformation is LignUp Corp.’s Release 4.0 of the LignUp Communications Application Server. LignUp 4.0 features 125 new VoIP Web Services, implemented by the release’s new J2EE-compliant LignUp Communications Integration Server, and support for such standard protocols as SIP, RTP, HTTP, SOAP and WSDL2.

The Integration Server is a new component within the LignUp 4.0 Communications Application Server architecture that streamlines application creation by providing a framework for using, creating, exposing and managing VoIP-based Web services, which serve as reusable software blocks for building communications-enabled applications.

“What’s amazing is people can build applications in days,” or even in one day, says Monica Pal, co-founder and lead in product development at LignUp. “And that’s lightening fast.” This also allows services to be altered after they’re activated “so service providers can try an application for a week, see how it sticks, and evolve it,” she adds.

Another benefit of this kind of application creation is it allows service providers and developers to justify the cost of application development for smaller groups of users, since the investment to create each application is significantly lower due to the ease-of-use and reusable components of the solution, Pal adds.

This idea of reusable application building blocks and ease of integration with existing network elements and back office systems has become a key theme both on the enterprise front, through SOA, or service-oriented architecture, and SDP (service delivery platform), which some see as service providers’ answer to SOA.

Best-known players in the SDP space are IT giants BEA, IBM and Oracle, but Microsoft and several of the traditional telecom vendors, including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Nokia-Siemens, as well as smaller players are also selling this new vision for breaking down service silos, using existing building blocks and doing mashups of existing applications

Link to article.

###