To attract and retain premium customers most service providers are increasing their portfolio of IP services from just VoIP to dozens of rich interactive real-time offerings. To support the development and deployment of communication-enabled applications the Covergence Session Manager provides a web services interface to give developers the ability the ability to exert dynamic, fine-grained, policy-based control over real-time communications.

For service providers one of the keys to offering new, revenue generating, profitable real-time services is their ability to enforce dynamic control policies that determine which service options and levels a particular user is entitled to at a particular moment in time.

An example of a service provider application is a wireless service provider is offering a pre-paid music download service (e.g. targeted to subscribers with PDAs that can play MP3). Using the CSM's web services interface, the service provider:

• Sets CSM policy to notify the business application (via web services) whenever a subscriber requests a music download
• The business application verifies the subscriber, checks their account balance and then debits the subscriber’s account for the price of the download, taking into consideration any promotional discounts that may apply to this particular subscriber at this particular moment in time
• Upon completion of the debit, the application sends the CSM a web service notification to begin the download

The Covergence Session Manager - having been designed to fully leverage Web Services standards – provides a public web service interface for every operation. This allows an authenticated (or set of authenticated) applications to dynamically and uniformly enforce policy over any or all real-time sessions.

Beyond web services Covergence also provides a set of components that reside in an Avaya, BEA, IBM or Oracle application server. The developer simply invokes Covergence policy component interfaces to secure, route, control, or monitor any real-time session. Leveraging these industry standards and proven platforms reduces the costs and complexity of deployment while delivering unparalleled high availability, reliability, scalability and performance. In addition, each of these vendors provide an IMS-SIP application server component and global ecosystem of NEP, SI and ISV partners that have standardized on these platforms for their next-generation communication products and solutions.

• Download the Policy Manager Presentation (PDF)
• Read the press release