In the world of natural selection, animals capable of evolving with a changing environment survive while those who do not, perish. As you enter an ice age for example animals with increasingly wooly coats are at an advantage. As you enter a warming period, a wooly coat could be a disadvantage.

 

With this in mind I had a great talk today with Sharone Ben-Levi Vice President Marketing, AudioCodes, Inc. Sharone spoke with me at length about the future of communications from their vantage point. With over six years at the company Ben-Levi is a great person to speak about where his company sees communications heading. Moreover, Audiocodes is intimately involved in many aspects of communications development and service delivery.

 

Next week at the Communications Developer Conference, Sharone will be giving a keynote focusing on survival of the fittest in the world of communications. He points out the last seven years were dominated by proprietary APIs connecting applications to hardware. The drawbacks to this sort of design are when you may need a more powerful processor you could have to change the chassis. Furthermore, when you change the operating system, you have to upgrade the integration.

 

Other challenges of using proprietary APIs are the fact engineers resist using them and when you have engineer turnover it is more difficult to find programmers with the specific programming skills you seek.

 

Sharone mentioned to me very few new designs use APIs to control gateways anymore… They use SIP. In addition he explained media servers use APIs today but we are moving towards a world of SIP and MSCML or Media Server Control Markup Language. The point? Proprietary APIs – even if they are HMP APIs are still proprietary.

 

They believe the world is breaking free from these APIs. In addition he says the concepts of IMS are being played out throughout the telecom industry. There are many benefits to this evolutionary approach including easily upgrading applications without the need to change network elements.

 

Sharone has numerous ideas and concepts about how companies will survive the future of a changing telecom environment. How they can become more efficient, respond to changes more effectively and keep them from being locked into proprietary development environments. As he says… He doesn’t want to give his whole presentation away as he is very much looking forward to hosting you live at the Communications Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA next week.