Nominum continues to evolve ENUM from a database application to a centerpiece of the IP multimedia subsystem and pre-IMS architecture, and advanced that strategy this week with a new release of its Navitas IP application routing directory.

Navitas 3.0 provides a platform that integrates legacy telephony numbering plans and IP routing identifiers. It contains a directory that enables the consolidation and simplification of routing plan management processes, improves telecommunication margins and optimizes usage of profitable and reliable routes.

The new release lets carriers reuse existing routing plans and ensures the reliability of call deliveries across interconnects. It dynamically accesses, stores and manages telephone routes and number mapping, while serving both legacy and converged IP switching infrastructure with route resolution for call termination. In particular, Nominum has added an Application Routing Module and an Element Management System.

The ARM allows Navitas to become a switch-agnostic signaling data repository that refines telephony and multimedia routes based on session parameters like cost, quality, capacity and content. The core technologies and features include a cascading query engine that federates multiple sources of routing data, support for parameter-based routing and a framework for Service Oriented Routing for resolution of multiple routing decisions. The EMS provides a single point for administration across a network of Navitas IPRD and ARM servers.

The new features are designed to advance the effort by Nominum to reinvent ENUM as a network control point by consolidating and centralizing the management of IP data in the network.

“With the consolidation of telephony and IP data…we are not creating a single choke point in the network,” said Georges Smine, director of product marketing at Nominum. “To the contrary, we are making the data ubiquitously available and facilitating new application roll out.”

As a player in the domain name server (DNS) space, Nominum knows that DNS needs to be hardened for the telecom market, said Albert Gouyet, Nominum’s vice president of marketing, claiming his company is the only one currently focused on it. Hardening the DNS environment will enable it to be used for other functions and applications, he said.

Many carriers are looking at Web 2.0 or next-generation architectures and seeing that the ability to manage data from the application side of the network is starting to influence operations, Smine said. “Part of the complexity of the business now is how you manage interconnects and VoIP peering.”

And managing those interconnections now goes beyond least-cost routing. “There is a lot of pressure managing the optimization of the routes because carriers need to look at multiple parameters like call quality, the bandwidth necessary for voice versus video calls and, now, what persona someone might be using,” Smine said.

The ARM helps take this routing burden off the switching elements, he said.