The Next SS7

Ask telecom entrepreneurs what they're working on these days and the term “SS7” comes up. Signaling System 7, the protocol for setting up and tearing down calls on the public switched telephone network, has been in place for nearly 30 years, and start-up companies today are looking for the SS7 of the future — the “next-gen SS7,” “SS7 on steroids” — that will do for a telecom network of clouds, servers and packet-based sessions what SS7 did for the circuit-switched network.

SIMTONE

After engaging top telcos across the globe for the last year and a half, SIMTone expects at least three or four carriers to start offering services over the company's cloud-based PC desktop platform this year.

The start-up's back-office software essentially pulls user desktop functions into the virtualized data center, allowing VMWare's virtualized server system to dynamically distribute resource consumption, creating tremendous efficiencies for carriers and allowing users to pay for only the resources they consume.

“It's sort of like a steroids-based SS7,” said Mario Dal Canto, CEO of SIMTone, who described the product's implications in a recent Telephony podcast.

SIMTone's system automatically recognizes users' devices and initiates sessions of managed virtual desktop use after the user verifies his or her name and password.

“The network knows everything it needs to know about you — the capabilities of your device, the location where you're connecting, the quality of bandwidth and connectivity you're getting, and your preferences — and our back-end software makes use of that information,” Dal Canto said.

The network-based platform stores all relevant information about users and their services on a disk, applying that knowledge and retrieving that data when users log in. The cloud is essentially placed behind a stealth IP address in a closed file — a technique SIMTone has patented.

“You're connected to your virtual PC in the cloud,” said Kurt Ziegler, executive vice president of SIMTone's high-performance division. “When you power off your device, it causes a disconnect [of the session]. … [Later], you bring your clients back up, log in, and immediately you're back with the keystroke you were on before you left. But in the meantime, your resources were not tied up. Your resources were put back down on a disk again until you needed them.”

With all the intelligence in the network, there's less need for intelligent PCs at the end. So for users, SIMTone's offering includes simple, inexpensive laptops that the company calls “terminals.”

“They are 100% stateless devices that never process, store or manipulate any data or user credential for any service,” the company's Web site explains. “That's why they are called terminals. Even during use, they don't hold any information about the service, the user or her/his data, anywhere.”

Such affordable devices could ultimately open up the consumer market for SIMTone's services as well, the company said. And because it is based on virtualized cloud computing systems, telecom service providers could smooth out the differences in processing demands between business and residential users: For example, the same infrastructure that powers business services during the week could maintain consumer services at night and on weekends.

Carriers could choose among different models for their relationship with enterprises: They could, for example, manage connections between their cloud and the enterprise's cloud. They could provide a managed cloud utility service — just capacity and transport, for example. Or carriers could provide the cloud and the software platform that sits on top — all as one service.

Whichever model carriers choose, SIMTone execs say their products let carriers leverage their infrastructure to address the burgeoning cloud computing market that others already are capitalizing on over carrier networks.

“We're moving intelligence back into the network, so carriers have their destiny back in their own hands,” Dal Canto said.

LAMBDA OPTICAL

Lambda Optical Systems, a reincarnated optical equipment vendor that emerged in 2004, has begun the third chapter of its life with a focus on developing call-control software for optical networks.

Now down to a staff of 11, Lambda Optical is working with customers in the U.S. Naval Research Lab and Department of Energy, using GMPLS-based software to automate call-control and bandwidth-scheduling in multivendor, multiplatform optical networks.

“We think of this as the next-generation SS7,” Irfan Ali, CEO of Lambda Optical, said in an interview. “The problem today is you've got equipment manufacturers like Ciena and Cisco that have their own systems, but they only work within their own island. On the other side, you've got people like Tekelec that might have a broad-based SS7-type portfolio, but they're interested in protecting their installed base and gradually migrating them. Meanwhile, FiOS, for example, is expanding rapidly, but how do you do call control with FiOS? There's no way to do it today.”

Ali expects to trial the new product in August and sell it commercially late next year — to government customers initially and telecom customers eventually.

Lambda Optical was created from the intellectual property of Firstwave Secure Intelligent Optical Networks, which fell apart in early 2003 after its top executives resigned following a spat with its venture capital investors. Those ex-executives then pulled in more VCs to buy Secure Intelligent's intellectual property and create Lambda Optical, which emerged in 2004 with a $22 million round of funding that raised the company's total to $46 million.

Perhaps unluckily for Lambda Optical, it unveiled a set of high-end all-optical products just weeks before Infinera debuted its own low-cost optical-electrical conversion technology, which undermined the case for all-optical gear like Lambda's. Sales of that gear is “very limited” today, Ali said. The five-year contract with the Naval Research Lab that helped spawn the company is now extended yearly. “In the future, we're not expecting [hardware] to be a big part of the business,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ali also is helming a stealth-mode start-up (so much so that he declined to talk about it) focused on network security and authentication. ZRON Networks “allows diverse organizations to undertake context-specific search for information dispersed across disparate data sets,” according to the company's Web site. ZRON does this with what it calls a “proxy service listener” and a customized domain name service server, according to a proposal the company submitted to NASA's Small Business Innovation Research program.

In addition to Ali, the Herndon, Va., start-up's management team includes Walter Weiss, a veteran of Ellacoya Networks and Lucent Technologies, and Jeffrey Humphrey, an engineering Ph.D. from system integrator Advent Systems, who holds a “top secret” security clearance from the federal government.