Pushing the integration of R&D and standardisation
Milan. ETSI and Eurescom have joined forces to push the integration of collaborative R&D and standardisation. In a jointly organised workshop at the IST 2003 conference in Milan on 4 October, they presented the new business opportunities that will emerge from an integrated approach to collaborative research and standardisation. This workshop highlights the profitable synergy to be found between R&D and standardisation strategies, moderator David Kennedy from Eurescom explained. Josef Noll, senior researcher at Telenor, presented results from a Eurescom project on wireless services in the future home. He demonstrated the business opportunities of personalisation technologies in a home environment, like SIM card authentication and seamless personalised access. Dr. Noll pointed out that the market success of these technologies would depend to a large degree on future standardisation of personalisation technologies. In the area of broadband networks and multimedia services, Tatiana Kovacikova, from the University of Zilina (Slovakia), presented the crucial standardisation gaps which need to be closed, like security for e-commerce and specifications of multimedia interoperability to enable the pervasive services era. She added: A generic definition of broadband multimedia services is still missing. Ms Kovacikova informed the audience that ETSI is working on an initial roadmap of multimedia services and applications to address this deficit., ,The role of service platforms in creating these new business opportunities was presented by Ultan Mulligan from ETSI, who explained the success of the OSA/Parlay standard. This standardised application interface (API) has opened the telecoms networks to third party service provisioning. There are already 27 OSA/Parlay gateways on the market and 19 application servers in operation. OSA/Parlay can be deployed cost-effectively in few days and enables services like call manager, conferencing, billing, customer relationship management, tele-voting, location based services, and unified messaging. Mr Mulligan mentioned the work of Eurescom project P1110 on Open Service Access as a prime example of R&D projects contributing to fast and effective standardisation. ,