Communications Developer: Catching Up With Pactolus' Ken Osowski

This week at the Communications Developer Conference, I had the opportunity to catch up with Ken Osowski, vice president of marketing and product management at Marlborough, MA-based, Pactolus, Inc.

 

Pactolus is a leading developer of feature-rich, carrier-ready IP voice services for converged TDM/IP and VoIP networks. The company’s suite of SIPware services and SIP-based RapidFLEX service delivery platform are designed to reduce the cost and time-to-market required to launch new subscriber services.

 

Here’s what Osowski had to say regarding the opportunities facing developers today.

 

“When the company launched in 1999, H.323 was still the rage, and we adopted SIP throughout our product line. Those were very early days, and what we’re seeing finally is just an all-out movement to SIP.

 

“Developers are looking for fast robust ways to develop applications around SIP protocol.”

 

Osowski continued, “We have been selling traditionally to service providers and what we are seeing is a channel develop for applications; both as resellers to service providers and also resellers to enterprise and hospitality and a number of other marketplaces, which is actually. This is being borne out by what we are seeing here at the show. It’s the people who have been reselling traditional PBXs or they started reselling IP PBXs, but now they want to own the application as a reseller.

 

“In fact this might be the first opportunity for them to do that.

 

“One fundamental change that developers are recognizing here at the Communications Developer Conference is that the software and the application development environment are totally separate from the hardware. What this allows the developer to do is make choices.”

 

I asked Osowski to explain a bit about what SIPdev.org is and what it means for developers.

 

“SIP dev.org reflects several of the components needed at the application layer. It includes the service creation environment the application server and the media server. There is no real definition in the industry of what a service delivery platform is, although several analysts have tried. Suffice it to say we probably have the most complete set of components that represent that.

 

“In a lot of cases you have service delivery platforms without service creation. You might have application servers without media servers. In some cases you’ll find hardware media servers with application servers mixed in.

 

“So there are all kinds of combinations. We are doing it on a pure software basis, all of which is downloadable from SIP dev.org.

 

I was curious to find out what we might see from Pactolus in the days and weeks and months ahead.

 

Osowski shared the following. “Well definitely you’ll see us augmenting SIP dev.org. I wouldn’t be surprised to see us putting up our software development kit, which allows people to extend the SCE and the application server on their own, with some open source opportunities for our objects that go into that, so that people cold actually write their own protocols in to it or API interfaces for legacy protocols.

 

“This would allow people to add what they need, if there was some special vertical market that they were going after and we didn’t supply that interface in the SCE or the application server.

 

“We’ll also likely see more reference applications.”