NEW YORK-The wireless information superhighway today is at the stage the interstate roads were during the 1930s, said Grover Righter, vice president of technical strategy for Kabira, San Rafael, Calif.
Back then, farmers saw the roads getting built and being illuminated near their land, but they still plowed their fields and traveled to town in the old-fashioned ways used for many preceding generations.
“The (network) infrastructure is getting to critical mass, and the operating companies need ways to pay for 2.5G and 3G wireless, so we focus on what happens at the edge of commercial development,” Righter said.
Kabira will make commercially available April 23 several plug-and-play enhancements to its ObjectSwitch event server that company officials said are designed to facilitate and accelerate enhanced wireless data deployment and usage.
Using industry standard interfaces like CORBA, Java, XML, COM and SQL, the new “Adapter Factory” automates the integration of applications into networks for delivery to end users.
“We take advantage of existing infrastructure to connect the large and growing number of applications to platforms like ours through industry standard interfaces,” said Diane Lawrence, vice president of marketing.
“We automate the connection to external apps, reducing months of work to minutes because companies don’t want to waste time with the plumbing part.”
Part of the Adapter Factory is the new “Web Adapter,” which allows consumers to interact directly with applications built on the Kabira platform. Subscribers can provision their own applications, but service providers retain control over what their customers see of their account information.
The operations support system functions, including payments to third-party content providers, are automated, eliminating the need for the paperwork and faxes typically generated on the back end of these transactions, Righter said.
Kabira also is releasing commercially its new “Business Accelerator, “a pre-built engine that is a tool for more quickly implementing intelligent work flow,” Lawrence said.
Designed for Universal Modeling Language, “the lingua franca of telecoms,” the Business Accelerator manages a stream of processes that includes order entry and confirmation, Righter said.
“There is a move to `model driven architecture,’ and we are an MDA company. We take stacks of software, like CORBA, UML and Parlez.org, glue them together and generate code. We have gotten rid of the hand-coding process that used to take several hundred engineers several years to do,” he said.
Kabira also takes advantage of “generic data record mediation,” another recent development in telecommunications. It accepts a variety of traffic, records, assembles them and recreates a unified whole recognizable to legacy billing systems.
Generic data record mediation is a sharp departure from the traditional way of tracking functions like call detail records and network alerts. Each was segregated into individual “stove pipes,” and the versions of these reached into the hundreds due to vendor variations in carrier network equipment design, Righter said.
At least in circuit-switched environments, all functions associated with an individual call are aggregated into one unit. However, in a packet-switched system, “there is no constant phone call, so you get lots of little intermediate packets,” Righter said.
Kabira’s technology is agnostic with respect to radio-frequency air interface technology, although most of the company’s existing installations are for GSM carriers in 16 countries outside the United States.
“Verizon’s Iusacell (in Mexico) is the first North American wireless customer we can publicly discuss, but we are now pushing into the United States because the new services offered need a class of software that didn’t exist before,” Righter said.
“Two significant changes are happening. First, the services are unique. Second, most new convergent services cross boundaries, part in circuit, part in packet, but the hardware doesn’t maintain the connections.”
