TADS – after the excitement of live innovation, where do you go next?
As the telecoms application development community confirmed at TADSummit in Lisbon last week, there is a wealth of innovation to be found in the industry. This innovation has many sources. While there are many from the traditional communications industry who now have the opportunity to cost-effectively develop their ideas and realise solutions through hosting partners, there are many more who come from unrelated sectors and who wish to incorporate communications and network functions into their applications and services.
This potential to extend applications in novel directions by integrating communications capabilities has long been recognised. The key is to make resources and capabilities accessible in ways that do not add to the complexity of the planned service or application.
Until relatively recently, working with some of the more arcane features of the mobile network, for example, required a depth of knowledge that was available only to a handful of experts. Of course, these do serve critical functions and they require considerable complexity to function, but decoupling this complexity from their control and making them accessible has been a key achievement in unlocking new levels of innovation.
One of the great successes of the TADs initiative has been to demystify the process. For many years, efforts to abstract complex network functions have floundered over disagreements of minutiae such as specific API commands. TADs helped to cut through by helping people to understand that the specific language or encoding method didn’t matter so much as simply making it available.
As a result, more and more developers have access to a wider range of network functions and capabilities. However, until recently, one area remained closed: mobile network registration and roaming. These functions have been closely protected by mobile operators and access has been available to a privileged few.
With Partitionware, that changes. Partitionware has brought core functions of the mobile network, such as the core databases that manage device registrations, location and roaming into the open, creating rich web APIs that allow developers to access these resources and to begin to integrate them with their applications, supported by the network reach and coverage of a leading global partner. With these assets at hand, developers can, for the first time, access rich functionality to reach mobile users and devices around the world.
For example, Partitionware allows developers to manage identities in the mobile network, which are stored in databases such as the VLR, so that they can secure interaction between Internet and mobile domains and provide full interchangeability of data – without knowledge of either domain.
There’s much more besides. Exposing such capabilities to the growing and eager community of developers helps foster further innovation and closes the gap between Internet-based applications and users and devices that exist in the mobile world. It’s a key missing link and promises to boost innovation for all. On which topic, we have exciting plans to provide new products for the developer community and will be making a series of announcements in the New Year.
