Parallels Summit - APS 2, the aggregators `production line’

The Parallels Summit, as reported, has focused extensively on the potential for service providers and other partners such as the VAR and SI communities, in becoming the services aggregators and managers for a wide range of business users, but for the SMB community in particular.

An important, practical part of this, especially when it comes to the aggregation of services, is the primary tool that many will need to use to make this happen – APS 2.0.

Version 2 of the Application Packaging Standard, which first appeared last year, introduced an important concept that service developers should find both powerful and valuable. Known as Composition, this is the ability to add individual services together to create a service `whole’ tailored to the needs of specific business users.

At this year’s event a couple of examples emerged that demonstrate that compositional capability in action. They also demonstrated the way the future for service aggregation can be, by showing how quickly applications that have been given an APS wrapper can be assembled together, and how potentially rich the results can be.

A demo of APS in action was included in the keynote presentation of CEO, Birger Steen. The scenario was a service provider being asked to add a new employee to an existing customer, and adding new services to those available to that company.

In both cases the process was to use a control panel to load relevant data, such as the employee name and other details, coupled with check-box picking of relevant services for that new employee from the list of services and applications available from an approved source. This source can be the full APS Library or a subset of applications selected as relevant to its chosen market sector by the service provider.

The process for adding a new application to those provided to a specific customer business is broadly similar, allowing an admin person to select from the applications to be added, and also connect them to a customer’s specific application groups list so they can be easily found and used.

The important part of this process is that the ease and speed with such additions or modifications to the services provided can be made. It also provides the mechanism through which service providers and aggregators can operate typical sales techniques such as up-selling. Options on services can be effectively hidden from any selection process until an opportune moment.

For example, a tool showing bandwidth consumed might indicate that the current limit was being reached by a business. At this point the service provider can offer, or the customer ask for, the limit to be raised. The result of this could be seen in the keynote demo to be applied and in use within a few seconds.

This capability opens up the opportunity for complete service suites for a new customer to be provisioned and available while the phone call taking the order is being made.

A completely different use for APS 2, but one even more relevant to potential service aggregators, was to be seen in the Summit exhibition area, where Open-Xchange was demonstrating not just the latest version of its OX App Suite and One Drive systems, but also how APS can be used to extend this core base of applications and services in just about any direction required.

OX App Suite takes email and moves it in a number of document management, information synchronisation, and collaboration services routes, by adding the services to the core email application. This is now complemented by the recently launched OX Drive service, a cloud –based storage service that adds synchronisation and collaboration services across multiple device types.

APS 2 is used to allow other applications and services to be added to this core set of applications. For example, it has been used by partner company, Dutch-based Voiceworks, as management and delivery underpinning for its VOIP telephony and video telephony applications.

The relationship between the two companies is such that Voiceworks acts the real time communications component of OS App Suite and OX Drive, utilising their content management, auditing, synchronisation and collaboration tools as its own.

According to Open-Xchange CEO, Rafael Laguna, using APS 2 in this way opens up the possibility for any company to add APS-compatible applications to the OX App Suite to build service suites of their own.

“Several users have already used it as the basis of CRM systems,” he said, “and we expect to introduce eight or nine developments using this approach over the coming year.”

From the service aggregator’s perspective, this use of APS 2 demonstrates how they could use to build services that suit a specific vertical market requirement. Indeed, it would become relatively straight forward to build a range of different service bundles that suited more granular requirements within that vertical market sector.

As Laguna acknowledged, this approach can also be used by end user businesses building private or hybrid cloud environments, and opens up the potential to create an environment where there can be an infinite number of partnerships available to every cloud user.