May 31, 2007
AppTrigger Intros Applications Session Controller

By Richard Grigonis
Executive Editor, IP Communications Group

AppTrigger is a Richardson, Texas-based company that helps service providers insulate their revenue-generating applications from the vagaries and vicissitudes of the ever-evolving fixed-line, mobile, and IP networks. Recently, in April 2007, AppTrigger announced the development of a new class of network element: the Applications Session Controller — not to be confused with the Session Border Controller, which can punch holes through firewalls to allow VoIP traffic to pass back-and-forth.
 
Patrick FitzGerald, Vice President of Marketing at AppTrigger, says: “We’re focused on a lot of the same concepts relating to unified communications, but we’re looking at it through a telecom lens and not so much through an enterprise lens. It’s interesting in that the unified communications and IP concepts in the enterprise space have been around from at least five years but, from my perspective, they’re finally getting a lot of traction and integration into a more holistic form, especially when you consider what Microsoft (News - Alert) and Nortel are doing.”
 
“I’d argue that, from an enterprise perspective,” says FitzGerald. “Unified communications is getting traction because people see there are productivity increases associated with it. It’s gone beyond the ‘gee whiz’ aspect and is recognized as a productivity tool.”
 
“So, we at AppTrigger are looking at all of this from a telecom perspective,” says FitzGerald. “In particular, we’re focusing on enabling service providers to create cross-network converged applications; i.e., providing the same user experience regardless of the access network on which they happen to be. Fundamentally, what this translates into is as follows: Today, if you think about service providers and how they offer applications, they offer separate, independent voicemail applications for wireline, wireless and IP customers. Our argument to the marketplace is quite simple: service providers today don’t have just one static network. They have an ever-evolving multitude of networks. If you look at what AT&T (News - Alert) is trying to do, they’re concentrating on being able to create the same user experience and the same applications regardless of which access network the user happens to be on.”
 
FitzGerald continues with, “Take a look at some of the exciting and cool things that AT&T is doing with such things as U-verse [a suite of IP-based products and services including U-verse television and super high-bandwidth Internet access]. U-verse is based on the concept of putting you, the subscriber, at the ‘center of the universe’ and, in turn, allowing you to be able to control the way you receive and manage your applications. The challenges with meeting that goal are that the actual networks themselves, between wireline and wireless – or wireline and IP – are subject both to a constant evolution of underlying standards, and a constant changing of protocols and interworking procedures.”
 
Application Session Controller to the Rescue
 
“AppTrigger focuses on being able to create a new network element that we call the Applications Session Controller [ASC] that resides between the applications service node and the core of the network,” says FitzGerald. “The Applications Session Controller provides interworking from network to network and allows one applications package to be able to traverse the multitude of networks to ensure that the subscriber has access to the same features on the wireless side as he or she would on the wireline side from an application standpoint.”
 
FitzGerald elaborates: “As a start-up company, we’re going to the market and are articulating that, as service providers wish to, for wont of a better term, ‘shadow’ what’s going on in the enterprise, they obviously also want to be able to this in the residential market, in which case one of the key areas that needs to be fixed and, indeed what an elegant solution is required for, is what transpires at the network layer for applications. Today, the current solutions out there limit that from taking place. The traditional model, currently in vogue, is where the application solutions serviced by the service provider utilize independent protocol stacks that they have to put into the application and so these applications are now optimized for just a single network per application. It will be very difficult to obtain the converged user experience if the providers continue down the path of utilizing the current application deployment model. That’s why AppTrigger is focused on solving this particular problem of ‘de-siloing’ the applications.”
 
“In looking at the marketplace,” says FitzGerald, “most applications today are very much ‘siloed’ into the overall network. So you have one application working with one particular network. It’s interesting, since this particular model creates what we like to call a ‘square one’ effort every time an application gets deployed. So, when an application is deployed, the service provider, in turn, must reinvent the wheel by connecting the billing and the OSS system. Moreover, the provider must connect the network every time they offer an application. It’s ironic, especially when you think about the excitement in the marketplace today about applications. The focus for the service providers has been on wanting to create exciting and revenue-generating applications for their subscribers, but a lot of the Tier-1 service providers today merely offer three to four new applications a year. Compare that with what transpires on the Internet, where new applications are created every day and there’s excitement going on within that space, because they have a very large ecosystem of application developers who are able to deploy numerous apps, but because of the size, scale and scope of things relating to rolling out a new service, the service provider must deal with a long, painful deployment process. And one of the key points in that ‘pain process’ is what transpires at the network layer.”
 
“So, we at AppTrigger are focused on being able to break down the silos, and enabling the service provider to go faster to market, because the network layer is no longer an issue – we provide that connectivity,” says FitzGerald. “And because our platform is able to support multiple applications, the service provider now has a much faster time-to-market, since the solution to the network aspect of the problem is already in place.”
 
Straightening Out Network Confusion
 
“If you consider the marketplace today and consider how applications are deployed, I would suggest to you a number of things,” says FitzGerald. “For example, part of the challenge with engendering this innovation from an ecosystem standpoint for the service providers is that the language an application developer needs to understand in order to be able to develop interesting applications, is fairly challenging. That’s because, with 30 or 40 years of different layers of language upon language, it’s almost as if the applications developer must learn ‘Latin’ to be able to write an application for the service provider. There’s been a lot of market effort concerning the development of various APIs in an attempt to break the problem down so that one can create an ecosystem of application developers. Our perspective on this is that we don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea of one particular API’s advantages over another; instead we support a variety of different APIs. Today we provide CCXML [Call Control eXtensible Markup Language, designed to provide telephony call control support for dialog systems, such as VoiceXML (News - Alert)] that allows the call control that’s necessary for certain applications such as voicemail services. We also support Parlay X [a set of powerful yet simple, highly abstracted, building blocks of telecom functions that developers can both quickly comprehend and use to generate new, innovative applications] for Web Services. We also support the original Parlay [an open API for fixed and mobile telephone networks] which is an IMS-ready API.”
 
FitzGerald adds, “Our approach is to be agnostic relative to the API, but to support as many APIs as possible, so that we can create a large enough solution set for the service providers so that they can appear to any community of application developers out there.”
 
“We’re arguing from a network perspective that, fundamentally, there is a new piece of equipment that’s required by the service provider, and that piece of equipment is what we call Applications Session Controller,” says FitzGerald. “The ASC sits between the applications and core network. It provides the ongoing network connectivity for all of the different applications that the provider offers on its networks. The ASC scales to such a degree that we’re able to support this scenario and we have support for a variety of APIs so that we can interwork with the majority of applications currently deployed by the service provider.”
 
FitzGerald drills down: “We feel strongly that this new category of network element is needed because, first, the network is always evolving and service providers are always optimizing their current network to take advantage of new technologies and new bandwidths. And, in turn, every time that they do that, the constant evolution of leveraging new technology impacts applications that are currently deployed on their networks, or it impacts the current application deployment model. We want to help the service provider by isolating the applications and removing them from the constant evolution of the network.”
 
“Secondly, as we said in the beginning of this interview, there’s this new focus on unified communications in a converged user experience,” says FitzGerald. “It’s about being able to offer applications to subscribers regardless of what network they happen to be on at any time. The challenge with doing that today is that applications are very much optimized for one particular network, which in turn creates a problem for service providers because they can’t utilize that same application platform to be able to push them across a new network as the network evolves. So, we believe that this new product category of Applications Session Controller is needed to, one, insulate the applications from the evolving network so that, two, you can create applications that are purpose-built for a multitude of networks as opposed to being purpose-built specifically for one particular network and the behavior on that network.”
 
“This also ties into IMS,” says FitzGerald. “I always feel a bit hesitant to say this, because from a marketplace standpoint you get ‘pinged’ about this if you say it too strongly, but I would argue that our technology serves as a very good transition, if you will, in taking old traditional IN [Intelligent Network] applications and bridging them into the upcoming IMS [IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert)] network.”
 
So, it looks like AppTrigger has devised a new and useful category of network element that joins the menagerie of other devices out there. We’ll keep an eye on what the service providers of the world do with it.
 
 
Richard Grigonis is an internationally-known technology editor and writer. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert),, he was the Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine from its founding in 2003 to August 2006. He also served as the Chief Technical Editor of CMP Media’s Computer Telephony magazine (later called CommunicationsConvergence ( News - Alert) from its first year of operation in 1994 until 2003. In addition, he has written five books on computers and telecom (including the Computer Telephony Encyclopedia and Dictionary of IP Communications). To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.