Media Servers and the telephony services they enable, e.g. Unified Communications, are normally bundled with the IP PBX (News - Alert). Aculab’s AMS Server is an application development platform that provides similar functionality, but it has been designed for fast, cost-effective development of new applications. This will allow departments in large enterprises and SMBs to have customized apps developed in short time frames. In addition, it can be deployed by service providers and application developers selling within the hosted space.

The platform enables developers to access the powerful telephony and media server functionality of Aculab’s Prosody S Host Media Processing (HMP) platform, which uses object-oriented programming languages.

Ian Colville (News - Alert), Product Manager at Aculab: “Implementing support for high-level languages such as C# for the .Net environment and Python for open-source and Linux users enables developers to bring telephony-based applications and services to market faster and with less cost. By combining these languages with Aculab’s (News - Alert) robust API, AMS Server can reduce development time by two orders of magnitude. In addition, it offers these efficiencies at a substantially lower cost compared to traditional development platforms.”

The core functionality of Aculab’s HMP platform is controlled through a C language API.  By its nature, C requires relatively complex commands and syntax.  The C# and Python APIs, now available with AMS Server, abstract the complex, low-level telephony processes inherent in the underlying C language structure and capabilities. Therefore they eliminate the need to deal with these issues when accessing or controlling the media server or telephony functions.

Ronald Gruia (News - Alert), Frost and Sullivan Principal Telecommunications Analyst: “In the fast paced world of business and telephony application development, nimbleness and responsiveness are essential requirements.  There is a shift from hardware- to software-based service platforms in the telecommunications sector.  It is refreshing to see a company with a hardware legacy like Aculab demonstrate its commitment to riding this wave. The ability to transition application development from a hardware platform to a server-based environment provides developers with several significant advantages.  In addition, improving service agility for providers will help to address evolving demands from the marketplace and fuel technology growth.”