Interview with Dr. Ayal Itzkovitz, CEO, Convergin
What are carriers doing in the area of mashups?
There has been a lot of activity going on over the last few months. They are keen to grasp the mashup movement and it is changing really fast. In North America big operators are investing in this area. BT is certainly much ahead. At least in their reference architectures carriers already
have it in place. It will take some time though. We are certainly seeing something we have not seen before.
How many customers do you have trialing your SCIM?
There are more than 10 in Europe and North America.
Out of those how many will leverage your SCIM for mashups?
In most of them this is one of the capabilities our SCIM is providing.
What is the role of SCIM in the mashup game?
The role of SCIM is providing an enabling point. SCIM by itself does not provide a service. It allows services to be delivered to fixed and mobile networks whether they are legacy or non-legacy networks. In some of the cases SCIM is embedded in a solution - more often embedded in an SDP or an application server. In some cases it is a standalone element carrying out the service mediation.
So there is service broker element in all the mashup delivery set ups. They may not necessarily call it SCIM but the functionality is there.
Yes all these developer programs are looking at the end result. Their accessibility from access layer to network layer goes through service broker.
Developers of mashups are demanding a broad range of APIs. Does that have implications for the type of capabilities SCIM has to bring in?
SCIM obviously needs to evolve in terms of supporting more and more protocols and interfaces that web services require. That would mean supporting XML, SOAP and other web services interfaces. You can have our SCIM as part of your J2E application server and by doing that you can have any kind of web services and mashups to influence the orchestration of services that our SCIM can deliver. We have done a lot of work adapting it to J2E environment.
The fact that there is a lot of activity going on in the area of mashups, would that create a demand for your SCIM product? Or will we see the vendors develop SCIM capability in their own platforms?
I think they will develop the capability into their platforms to a certain extent. But again you are tying the capability of service brokering with just a subset of applications that run on just that application server. The issue is not the vendor side. Service providers are trying to define a wider role for SCIM and they will not get it from those solutions that integrate this element in the services platform.
What kind of mashups will we see predominantly?
I think the first set of mashups will be about the existing services that service providers have. That could be the personal portals, call management configuration services that you are already seeing to an extent. Going forward, greater integration with social networks and multiple devices including TV etc.
