While the popularity of social networking services and application distribution platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google, Apple, and Android are exploding, their presence in the market erodes the revenue streams of many telecommunication operators. The philosophy of appNGIN is to help telecommunication operators work more effectively with these social networking applications rather than against them by opening new a new range of blended services.
The blended services built with appNGIN combine “traditional” telecommunication services with new communication channels and formulate new revenue generating applications. With technological convergence, the boundaries of the computer, fixed, and mobile telecom industries are disappearing. Operators are recognizing the value of incorporating blended services based on voice, data, presence, and location information. appNGIN enables the creation and deployment of these next generation IN services and puts the control back in the hands of revenue seeking operators. appNGIN is built on top of Oracle Communications products like Oracle Communications Converged Application Server and Oracle Communications Service Broker. These products provide connectivity to network resources and a SIP Servlet and J EE execution environment.
appNGIN supports both “traditional” SS7 networks and IP based networks like IP Multimedia Subsystem and provides functional building blocks that enable the application developers to program at a higher level of abstraction. appNGIN consists of three layers:
1. Service enablers, functional building blocks.
These are standards based pre-built components that implement specific telecommunication capabilities such as call conference, rule based call routing, or presence and location information management. These re-useable components are based on the standards defined in SIP, SIP SIMPLE, and the Rich Communication Suite related specifications.
2. Development and Mashup framework.
This is a Telecom 2.0 and Web 2.0 development environment both for developers and end-users. The development environment helps developers expand their creativity and make new converged communication applications by re-using and customizing the portfolio of service enablers and functional building blocks.
3. Mobile client widgets.
These widgets are native mobile device application components that implement some basic Rich Communication Suite features like Network Address Book GUI, Presence & IM GUI, and location service GUI. Telco operators that want to be more than bit pipes can use mobile client widgets to build communication client applications that offer compelling mobile services to customers. The appNGIN source code for Android and iPhone RCS client applications is available at SourceForge.
White Paper: appNGIN - Alerant NGIN Platform