Interview with Tom Tovar, CEO, Nominum

ENUM look up system is also part of the IMS blueprint. Are the IMS projects implementing ENUM in practice? Where are ENUM servers being deployed today?

Some of the IMS projects are becoming smaller due the present economic conditions. Public ENUM has gone by the wayside. But there are a host of new applications for ENUM server products. There can be wholesale applications like our deployment at Telus where our product is being used for arbitrage route plans. Having said that, we have a number of IMS wins. France Telecom is one of our larger ENUM deployments where they are using our solution along with NSN’s IMS solution. We see a lot of inside carrier federation projects where you might have multiple or heterogeneous softswitch environment. ENUM servers there are being used as aggregation point for route plan data. That data is then made available to softswitches and SBCs. So you provide one provisioning and aggregation point for route plan data and push that out to networking elements. When you do those type of projects you naturally look into LNP kind of possibilities. So the scope is vast in theory as well as in practice.

Could there be some overlap in functionalities i.e. an SBC or a softswitch subsuming some of the ENUM routing functionalities?

We could have some overlap in deciding where in the network the call routing decision is made, for instance. Other than that we don’t expect much overlap as different network elements evolve and scale as per particular functions. IMS could live or die. But one of the things it is going to teach us is how to architect new generation networks. IMS defines the specific roles of various different network elements and I think that is the trend we are likely to see.

I guess the prospects for your solutions depend upon the extent to which a carrier in the future wants to keep the control at the core of the network. When you have more and more intelligence migrating towards the edge such as a peer-to-peer scenario like Skype, what kind of role would your product be playing?

Your instincts are spot on. When I talk to carriers I tell them this is the platform that delivers control. What carriers realize is that the external services, such as the peering fabrics, are essentially there to provide layers of reliability, disaster recovery, backup and storage – things of that nature. There is a paradigm shift going on inside carriers. Only when the burden of managing the data that they want to manage internally becomes huge, only at that point will they go out to an outside service provider. At the same time, with centralized infrastructure, there are certain costs that can be reduced. For instance you can centralize LNP and centralize provisioning of multiple softswitches.

Is ENUM going to go once the PSTN goes? You don’t need to translate a phone number into an IP address once PSTN goes. Perhaps you would be dialing by username or something.

There are several theories out there as to what the universal identifier is going to be. There could be different identifier constructs in different parts of the world. What is likely to happen is that we will unlock ourselves from the telephone number. But you will still need an IP address translation to map various identifiers.

Have you ever thought of providing outsourced services yourself since there could be some demand from the smaller service providers? And it would not jeopardize your relationship with the larger carrier customers.

I have kept us out of that. Ultimately the service that is required here needs to be provided over a tier 1 infrastructure.

Any threat from open source ENUM?

It is perfectly natural in any technology area to experiment and test that might include freeware. For validation purposes open source is a positive aspect.

There are lots of established carriers out there using open source for things like IM, VoIP, DNS etc.

Out of the three areas you just mentioned, take the example of DNS. The DNS security is one of the profound issues that has hit the internet for a while. Hackers are able to re-direct traffic to unintended destinations where malware could be deposited. Every application including VoIP transaction is affected. Open source DNS solutions are not able to handle these issues. The patches that are made available are creating disruptions in certain applications. We, on the other hand, have had great deal of success protecting the networks of those carrier customers that use our DNS solutions.