On Message with Ben Gross

My colleague Sameer Karmarkar of Persistent Systems, which just closed over $18mm in funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Gabriel Venture Partners, recently sent me a short note about why virtual directories need transaction support. Sameer says:

Virtual Directories are a great technology to facilitate convergence in the telecom industry. Telecom services and network convergence has been touted for a long time and as of today, most of the major carriers have had limited success in offering cost-effective and fast integration solutions, primarily because of the pace at which new networks are introduced.

There has been a lot of work by IETF in defining protocols to manage different networks, however, nothing to do with data integration. The virtual directories offer exactly the flexibility that many of the telecom service providers need from Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs). It allows the administrators to define various classes of service without needing any change in the application interface. It can store user information, provide selective views, control access and expose various interfaces. This, along with context based authentication, allows different telecom applications to fetch the data stored in the underlying repositories using a single interface. Telecom billing systems could be allowed to read data related to class of service, CDRs, actual talk time while, the service provisioning will create records on two different systems without worrying about all the underlying repositories.

As Sameer goes on to say, transaction support is still missing from virtual directories, but Persistent Systems is working to build this in. If they can deliver, they will be in a position to take companies like Avaya, Siemens, Ericsson, Nokia etc. closer to delivering the goal a wide range of new services, including broadband and IMS (IP Multimedia subsystems).

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