OSGi SPECIFICATION RELEASED AT CONNECTIONS 2000 Open Standard for Services Gateways Now Backed by 60 Companies

San Diego, Calif. - (May 3, 2000) - The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) today officially released the OSGi specification at a special session at CONNECTIONS 2000: Advancing the Networked Home. The OSGi specification, which complements virtually all-residential networking standards, defines an open standard that enables multiple software services to be loaded and run on a services gateway such as a set top box, cable modem, DSL modem, PC or dedicated residential gateway. More than 60 leading technology companies are now part of the OSGi organization (http://www.osgi.org), an independent, non-profit corporation working to define and promote open standards for the delivery of multiple services over wide-area networks to local networks and devices.

OSGi (booth #301/400) is a Platinum Sponsor of CONNECTIONS 2000, the premier event for companies making and using residential gateways and home networks to promote new applications and services in North American homes. Many OSGi member companies will also be exhibiting on the trade show floor and discussing their plans to support the OSGi specification in next-generation products and services.

"The OSGi specification delivers a critical piece of the home and small business networking puzzle," said John Barr, president of OSGi, and director, Systems Architecture and Technology for Personal Area Networks, Motorola. "It creates a platform-independent delivery vehicle for value-added network services and a means for integrating the various networks in the home or small business into a unified system. And, it enables new business opportunities for network operators - cable operators, Telcos, and ISPs - to offer services from multiple ASPs to their subscriber base. A variety of OSGi-compliant products and services will be available later this year, thanks to the strong support of our rapidly growing membership."

Initially based on Java technology, the OSGi specification enables a new business model for the home networking market by allowing multiple value-added services to share the cost of a single services gateway, and gives application service providers, network operators, and device and appliance manufacturers both application and platform independence. Additionally, by allowing a single services gateway to support multiple local networks, such as in-home local area networks (LANs), audio/visual networks and control networks, the OSGi specification enables valuable new services that integrate these previously discrete network islands.

With the OSGi specification, high-value services can be dynamically loaded over a wide-area network into a services gateway. Once resident in a services gateway, these services, such as energy measurement and control, safety and security services, health care monitoring services, device control and maintenance, electronic commerce services and more, can interact both with devices and networks in the home or small office and with clients and servers. The services gateway can also consolidate and manage voice, data, control, Internet and multimedia communications to and from the home and small office.

"A multi-function, standards-compliant gateway allows service providers to offer ever-more desirable packages of services," said Tricia Parks, president of Parks Associates. "That is essential to accelerate new services availability and adoption by consumers. In short, the evolution to a high-capability gateway is an important consumer innovation, and we both applaud and support OSGi's efforts."

APIs for an OSGi-Compliant Services Gateway

The major technical effort in the first release of the OSGi specification is on the application programming interfaces (APIs) implemented on the gateway and available to service developers. Follow-on specifications will cover other parts of the end-to-end architecture.

To ensure a large target market for third-party service developers as well as a large selection of compatible services for gateway operators, OSGi specifies API standards for the gateway platform execution environment. Gateways must support these API standards in order to be compliant with the OSGi specifications. A Java-based services gateway will feature the following required components:

• Java environment -- defines required packages and classes;
• Service framework -- defines APIs for creating and running services;
• Device access manager -- defines APIs for accessing devices; · Log service -- defines a required service for logging information.

In addition to the required APIs present on all OSGi-compliant gateways, an optional service, HTTP service, which defines a service API for an HTTP-based Web server is defined in the first specification release.

The OSGi specification is designed to complement and enhance virtually all residential networking standards and initiatives, such as Bluetooth, CAL, CEBus, Convergence, emNET, HAVi, HomePNA, HomePlug, HomeRF, Jini technology, LonWorks, UPnP and VESA. In the same way, the specification leverages the value of existing wireline and wireless networks while providing flexibility toward cable, WCDMA, xDSL and other high speed access technologies.

OSGi is also finalizing details and logistics related to a specification compliance program. This program will allow OSGi members to test their products in OSGi-approved facilities to ensure their offerings are compliant to the OSGi specification, and to publicize this fact. Customers will win too, as OSGi-compliant products and implementations will provide greater assurance that these products are compatible.

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