by Kent Winter
Vice President of Sales - EMEAA
I just returned from my second whirlwind trip through Asia in the past four weeks. Much of the Service Delivery buzz over the past year has revolved around Java Containers. They are open, provide a familiar environment to many web developers, and in many cases these containers provide a viable migration path for
IN applications, including media-based applications like Network IVR.
Of course Operators don’t want to talk about plain old Network IVR anymore… they want to talk about new and exciting things like Video IVR, especially as they try to recover their 3G investment and migrate to IMS or some SIP-based core.
This brings me to the research labs of one of APAC’s largest Operators. After showing some demo applications, including a couple which allow a caller to navigate Google Map on a Video IVR call, I was hit with a flurry of detailed questions by a couple of the labs developers about our web service integration and how our OmniView® Service Creation worked.
The Director in charge of the group was proud of the two young developers peppering me with questions. “They are my stars! They can do anything!” He said to gain their business he had to win them over. Then he said, “Let me show you some applications in our lab…”
As we walked through their fully functional IMS switch room into their labs, our local partner was pleased as they had never made it back into the labs before. But their spirits sank in horror when they saw the first demo application… a video IVR call which allowed the caller to navigate Google Maps.
The Director was proud as he said, “These two young developers, my best and my brightest, put together the same application as you have using our IN SDP. Everything was developed in the Java Container right down to the MSCML scripts to the Media Server. It isn’t production ready as we still need to tie it into other applications to make it useful, not to mention the OSS. “
Then he smiled and asked, “How long did it take your developers to write your application? Both of my guys worked three months, line by line to get this done.”
Everyone had seen the Google Map application developed in the OmniView Service Creation. One that even I could navigate and explain… I made a guess… I said “I think three days”.
I later asked the APEX engineer who wrote our Google Map application how long it too and he said “It didn’t take three days, it only took three hours, on my laptop while I waited for my wife in the mall.”
The choice was clear… non-production multimedia applications in six man months using a Java Container…. or a production ready, live multimedia application in OmniView in three hours.
How should your best and brightest spend their time?
