The BrainYard - Where collaborative minds congregate.

Irwin Lazar, Vice President & Service Director, Nemertes Research

April 30, 2008

1 Min Read

A few weeks ago I wrote about Broadsoft Xtended, Broadsoft's effort to open its Broadworks call control platform for hosted telephony services.  Broadsoft's hope is to allow developers to integrate Broadworks features into their Web 2.0 applications.

Broadsoft appears to have started a trend.................

In the last few weeks we've seen two other significant announcements of vendors opening up their previously closed platforms to third party application developers.  The first is Cisco, who released their Application eXtension Platform (AXP), a Linux-based module for running third-party applications directly on Cisco branch routers. 

Yesterday, AOL joined the fray announcing an open API for those wishing to write applications to interface with its AIM Call Out  service.

I'm fascinated by these developments, what we're seeing is a clean break from the "build everything in-house" model that has dominated most application development, and instead we're seeing major vendors embrace the community/open source approach of delivering an open platform to enable developers to innovate on their own.  It will be interesting to see what comes out of these initiatives in terms of applications and new services.

About the Author(s)

Irwin Lazar

Vice President & Service Director, Nemertes Research

Irwin Lazar is the Vice President and Service Director at Nemertes Research, where he manages research operations, develops and manages research projects, conducts and analyzes primary research, and advises numerous enterprise and vendor clients. Irwin is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in areas including VOIP, UC, video conferencing, social computing, collaboration, contact center and customer engagement.

A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and sought-after speaker and author, Irwin is a blogger for No Jitter and frequent author for SearchUnifiedCommunications.com. He is a frequent resource for the business and trade press and is regular speaker at events such as Enterprise Connect and Interop. Irwin's earlier background was in IP network architecture, design and engineering.

Never Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.

You May Also Like


More Insights