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The great composer
An innovation getting a lot of attention these days is a technology that can create new services based on existing ones without the need to write new software. Sounds amazing? Well, it is.
August 3, 2009
Ioannis Fikouras, the Ericsson brain behind the composition engine, explains: “If an operator wants to combine a location-based service with a weather forecast service, it’s not necessary to create the application from scratch. Operators can instead use the composition engine to automatically create a new location-based service by reusing the old components that are already available.”
The composition engine has been so successful that six operators had already signed-up before its launch in May this year. Fikouras says that in addition to the endless service combinations the technology offers, it can also save operators a lot of time and money.
“Normally, when we offer a service to a customer it often doesn’t fit right away and making changes can cost a lot of money,” he says. “With this technology, operators or Ericsson’s services unit can make the changes themselves. They don’t have to go back to the product developer.
“For example, we had a request from one operator to create a service and if we had done it with traditional tools, it would have taken us over 3,000 man hours. Instead, we were able to complete it in three weeks, using only three people.”
The idea for the composition engine came to Fikouras while he was working on his PhD at the University of Bremen in Germany in 1999. At the university, Fikouras gained insight into how machines are built and he thought that he could apply that method to software. “A car maker can tell a computer to assemble the different standard parts to build a brand-new car,” he says. “My idea was to build the composition tools on the software side in a similar way to enable the re-use of software.”
The road from conception to reality has been a speedy one, according to Fikouras. He started working for Ericsson Research at the company’s Eurolab in Aachen, Germany in 2005, and in 2006, a prototype of the technology was built with the support of his colleague Roman Levenshteyn.
The innovation is now marketed under the name Ericsson Composition Engine. Today, it is also used as a platform for other service-layer products. “Using this mechanism offers so many advantages that Ericsson now integrates it with a number of products,” Fikouras says.
