Jaduka blazes telecom API trail

Service providers are starting to experiment with business models in which application programming interfaces are as important as services. But what would such a business look like?

Consider Jaduka. The company has built a suite of APIs that provide developers with access to and the ability to “mash up” public network capabilities and services, such as trigger telephone calls, manage voicemail or integrate call history details into apps. The APIs run on top of a switching and billing infrastructure run by parent company, NetworkIP.

Last week, Jaduka reported network usage metrics that, according to company president Jack Rynes, show how an API-driven telecom business can — and should — grow.

Driven by APIs and a focus on serving the transaction-heavy retail industry, Jaduka reported its network has passed 4 million minutes per month in core voice traffic. Beyond that, Jaduka and NetworkIP have built their network to support transaction-oriented traffic. The platform currently processes 700,000 API transactions and 1.5 million database queries per day, but it can support transactions at a rate of 28 million user accounts and 300 million queries each day — up to 1285 account transactions per second, the company said.

Those numbers could provide some early-adopter guidance, as carriers begin to engineer access to their infrastructures by third parties via network and back-office APIs.