Comverse is currently developing a next-generation application called the Message Broker, which is designed to take all of the disparate forms of messaging on a carrier's network and route them through a single box, allowing e-mail to become text messages, multimedia messages to become voice mail and any other combination a carrier can think of.

Transcoding from one format to another is nothing new. Nor is the idea of a universal messaging controller--it's one of the core principles of IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) technologies. But Comverse's planned Message Broker is neither a typical transcoding solution, nor is it an IMS solution, said James Colby, Comverse's chief marketing officer for the Americas. Most transcoding solutions have been gateways to date, allowing carriers to translate between one specific message format to another, such as from MMS to SMS. And while the Message Broker could easily integrate into a next-generation IMS architecture, it's being designed for today's networks and leverages all of the legacy messaging solutions a carrier has already deployed, Colby said.

"What we have are these weird, wonderful gateways that work for specific types of solutions," Colby said. "What we don't have is a universal hub, that sits on a higher level from the messaging infrastructure itself."

The Message Broker signals a new direction for Comverse, one that many applications developers are turning toward. After years of developing unified messaging solutions and universal mailboxes that didn't sell, Comverse is refocusing on the network instead of the client. The new assumption is customers don't want to be bothered with whether they are sending an MMS or SMS message and e-mail or an instant message. The just want to compose a message, attach a picture or a file and hit send, and then not worry whether the recipient actually receives it, Colby said.

The Message Broker is intended to make those decisions for the user in the network where it examines the profiles and handset capabilities of the sender and recipient and sends the appropriate message, Colby said. For instance, a customer receives a picture message from a friend, which he wants to respond to with a simple text message. Responding to a picture message automatically creates an MMS message, which often costs more money, takes greater resources and is more difficult to transcode between networks. The Message Broker would simply recognize the message contains only text, strip that text from the MMS and send it as a simple SMS, Colby said.