The Environment Is The Application – It Really Is All About Web 2.0 Eric Burger, Deputy CTO, BEA Systems Inc. Abstract There has been considerable research on creating telecommunications applications. This is so much so that we are here today at a conference focused on a narrow niche of application development, that for mobile services. Much effort has been spent trying to make application development easier. By easier, we often mean use less development resources or use less deployment resources. One of the promises of the converged, all-IP network was easier application creation. It is clear from academic studies and commercial experience this promise has been fulfilled, most notably by the introduction of the stimulus / markup model of application development. The modern embodiment of the stimulus / markup model, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), has gained considerable interest in the telecommunications market. The promise of rapid application development, coupled with rapid OSS/BSS/OA&M integration is appealing. However, there is darkness on the horizon. The telecommunications industry has not been transformed by rapid application development. The promise of a rapid application development environment creating the next “killer application,” or service that everyone has to have, has not materialized. Nor have many service providers rushed to purchase these application environments. In the mean time, non-traditional entrants to the market, historically from the Internet / Web space, have made significant inroads against the service providers in terms of public mind share, and all indicators show they will achieve significant commercial success, at the expense of traditional carriers, as well. The key focus of this session is to take a non-traditional look at services and service creation, and show how the next-generation services environment is the killer application. We will show that it is not the ability of the carrier or trusted vendor to create applications easily, but the ability of untrusted third-parties to create applications that will change the telecommunications landscape. Eric Burger - Biography Dr. Eric Burger is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for BEA Systems. Dr. Burger’s research interests, and his work with academic and research laboratories, include interactive real-time multimedia applications, edge computing, and sensor networks. Dr. Burger contributes to and holds leadership positions in several standards bodies, including having written most of the SIP media RFC’s in the IETF and contributing to VoiceXML and CCXML in the W3C. In addition, he is the Chair of the lemonade (mobile e-mail), mediactrl (IP media control), and speechsc (speech services control) work groups in the IETF. He serves on the Board of Directors of the IMS Forum and the SIP Forum, and he is an advisor to the Voice-over-IP Forum of Japan. Dr. Burger co-founded SnowShore Networks, where he served as CTO and invented the SIP-controlled multi-function media server. He has held senior positions at companies such as Cable & Wireless, MCI, Texas Instruments, Cantata Technology, Brooktrout Technology, and ADC/Centigram. He holds over eleven issued patents and has numerous patents pending. He is a Senior Member of the ACM and IEEE, and is a Patron of the AAAS and Benefactor of the Internet Society. Dr. Burger has taught at George Mason University and George Washington University and holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Catholic University of Leuven, and Illinois Institute of Technology, as well as an Ingineur degree conferred by the Belgian Ministry of Education.