Nortel Networks is best-known as a networking equipment vendor, but with its Agile Communications Environment initiative — launched last fall with IBM — it is making a big push into service-oriented architecture and Web services technologies.

Earlier this month, Nortel's efforts to integrate its SOA technologies with IBM's WebSphere application server won it an award at IBM's Impact conference. Those efforts are driven out of the enterprise side of its business but play heavily in the service provider market as well.

For carriers today, building a bandwidth-rich, scalable wireline/wireless infrastructure must go hand-in-hand with building a service infrastructure capable of delivering what John Bednarek, director of SOA enterprise global marketing for Nortel, called “communications-enabled” applications. And that means leveraging SOA and Web services to no longer tie apps so closely to the network gear they run on, while at the same time making sure apps are built from the ground up to run in highly distributed network environments.

“You can't have [application] silos, either within a service provider or across enterprise and service provider networks,” Bednarek said. “SOA helps tear those barriers down.”

Nortel has launched an SOA project with the Mobile Emergency Triage Research Group at the University of Ottawa, leveraging Web services and mobile devices to improve how doctors respond to incoming emergencies.

To enable such applications, Bednarek said, Nortel has added Web services to its Communication Server 1000/2000 IP multimedia softswitches, while building a software-based platform and tool kit to help providers create new services. The platform links with application servers such as WebSphere for service creation and delivery, and via adapters to underlying network infrastructure — including both Nortel and non-Nortel infrastructure.

Nortel and IBM have certified their SOA/Web services approach to two industry “frameworks” — health care and retail — with a focus on additional vertical sectors to come, he said.

Instead of taking a traditional approach and selling a complete solution, Bednarek said, “Our approach today is: ‘Here's our software toolkit; see how it works with your existing infrastructure and create new apps built on this platform.’”