Relevance of SDK to foster IMS application development

Today’s user wants exciting new services at reduced costs. Legacy “voice” services are considered to be bare minimum. To satisfy their customers and be competitive, Telecom service providers are pressured to provide converged and differentiated services at reduced cost. IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is touted to be next generation telecom architecture that enables service providers to achieve this requirement. IMS architecture allows service providers to offer a variety of multimedia services in the Service layer. Service providers today are building an eco-system with partner vendors to offer new services in this layer. With the success of person-to-person and person-to-content services in the internet world, it becomes more compelling for mobile device manufactures and service providers to reach out to developer community to create more innovative applications with IMS infrastructure. This paper describes how “service creation” focus is being shifted from operators and mobile device vendors to third party developers. It explores the benefits of having a service creation platform to aid in developing such services. It outlines the elements of Software Development Kit (SDK) which will help in maximizing productivity and enables developers to focus on creativity. This paper analyzes the need for a complete simulated setup for developers to create and test their services before deploying into real network. There are different service creation environments that are available like Service Delivery Platforms (SDP), JAIN SLEE, and OSA/Parlay etc. In this paper the primary discussion is on the usage of standards based API in IMS/SIP SDK. It dwells more into JSR API for client development and Application Server development. It also touches upon how SIP SDK can be interfaced with Web2.0 components.