Parlay Availability
The Parlay Group knows of over 50 implementations of Parlay-based systems. Most of them seem to be internal to telephony network operators. However, there have been new announcements that deliver on the promise of opening the networks to external developers. For example, British Telecom (BT) is going to offer a subset of the Parlay X (web services) platform as a part of the 21st Century Network strategy (21Cn); see document (SIN or STIN) number 418 at http://www.sinet.bt.com/. In the U.S., Sprint PCS announced the Sprint Business Mobility Framework. That service is also based on Parlay X, but is more focused on enterprise applications rather than retail services (http://www.parlay.org/docs/may2004mm/Opening_Plenary/05Sprint_IBM.pdf). Both BT and Sprint provide Parlay X web services for external developers and implement them on top of internal Parlay gateways (with CORBA access). Such architectures let application writers use their preferred development environments and gives telephony network operators good protection of their internal assets.
—B.B. and M.P.
