Parlay Group

'Parlay/OSA' was an open API for the telephone network. It was developed by The Parlay Group, which worked closely with ETSI and 3GPP, which all co-publish it. Within 3GPP, Parlay is part of Open Services Access.

The Parlay Group was a technical industry consortium (founded 1998, ended around 2007) that specifies APIs for the telephone network. These APIs enable the creation of services by organizations both inside and outside of the traditional carrier environment. In fact, it is hoped that services can be created by IT developers, rather than telephony experts.

Important Parlay APIs include: call control, conferencing, user interaction (audio and text messaging, SMS/MMS), and billing. The APIs are specified in the CORBA Interface definition language and WSDL. The use of CORBA enables remote access between the Parlay gateway and the application code. A set of Java mappings allow the APIs to be invoked locally as well. A major goal of the APIs is to be independent of the underlying telephony network technology (e.g. CDMA, GSM, landline SS7).

In 2003 the Parlay Group released a new set of web services called Parlay X. These are a much simpler set of APIs intended to be used by a larger community of developers. The Parlay X web services include Third Party Call Control (3PCC), location and simple payment. The Parlay X specifications complement the more powerful but more complex Parlay APIs. Parlay X implementations are now (September 2004) in commercial service from BT and Sprint.

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