Google Voice has a useful feature whereby it will call your phone and another number, then link the calls. This is free within the US, and very cheap for international calls (certainly cheaper than dialing out directly from my mobile phone).
You can see the interface below:
Looking at this interface got me thinking about Parlay-X. For those of you not familiar with Parlay-X, it is a Web Services interface for driving a telecoms platform. It is one of the basis technologies of a Service Delivery Platform (SDP) which allows mobile operators to develop new services quickly. Many of Vordel's customers in the telecoms area are using Parlay-X.
Parlay-X includes the "MakeACall" interface which allows you to initiate a call between two phones, exactly as is done in the Google Voice scenario. In the screenshot below you can see an example MakeACall request in Vordel SOAPbox (with the phone numbers circled) and on the right you can see that the Vordel XML Gateway is monitoring the traffic.
Given their secrecy, it is impossible to know if Google uses Parlay-X. But if you want to check out Parlay-X for yourself, grab a copy of SOAPbox and load in some sample messages.
About Mark O'Neill Mark O'Neill is Chief Technology Office of Vordel. Vordel connects applications to applications, businesses to other businesses, and SOA to the Cloud.
A regular speaker at industry conferences, Mark holds a degree in mathematics and psychology from Trinity College Dublin and graduate qualifications in neural network programming from Oxford University.
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