Overview
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).
Read more about this topic: Parlay Group