Service Broker Forum advances vendor case

Many industry forums exist for the purpose of creating standards, making sure product development and marketing practices conform to standards or ensuring that various companies in an ecosystem play nice in the absence of standards. The new Service Broker Forum, however, is different and refreshingly candid in its actual purpose--to sell more service broker technology.

The group was founded by five vendors who normally compete in the sector for systems that enable converged-service development over today's networks without the need to advance to an IP Multimedia Subsystem environment. A Telephony story notes that these companies -- Aepona, AppTrigger, Convergin, jNetX and OpenCloud - are trying to show network operators that there is a viable middle ground between depending too much on legacy systems and making an all-out expensive and complex jump to IMS.

Service broker systems manage interactions between applications, application servers and other network elements. Pooling resources to promote a common system concept--if not each company's individual products--sounds like an idea that could catch on, and according to the Telephony story, Yankee Group analyst Brian Partridge gets credit for this one.

For more:
- Telephony has this report

Related article
Aepona expanded into North America last year