Telecommunications operating system

A telecommunications operating system used to manage resources for telecommunication application programs, where the telecommunications operating system works in conjunction with a general operating system, the telecommunications operating system comprising:

• a system integration layer that communicates with underlying hardware and the general operating system, where the system integration layer further arranges available hardware resources into virtual resource pools;
• a telecommunications service application layer that includes application program interfaces (APIs), which provide protocols and routines that allow a higher-level application to communicate with underlying hardware with a program interface so that the higher-level application is portable from one hardware system to another, where the telecommunications service application layer further includes a messaging protocol that translates and formats data to and from the APIs to a format compatible with the underlying hardware;
• and
• a telecommunications operating system layer that coordinates data transfers to and from the system integration layer and the telecommunications service application layer, the telecommunications operating system layer configured to monitor available resources on the underlying local hardware and on remote systems, the telecommunications operating system layer further configured to allocate available resources among detected local telecommunications applications and configured to reallocate the resources in response to changes in resource demands.

A system adapted to provide a platform on which telecommunications applications can be layered, the system comprising:

• means for providing an interface so that a user may log in;
• means for accessing an account associated with the user;
• means for automatically detecting hardware resources resident on a local system that are related to telecommunications;
• means for pooling the detected hardware resources into related virtual pools;
• means for establishing contact with remote systems and obtaining a status of the resources available on the remote systems;
• means for detecting one or more telecommunications applications associated with the user;
• means for allocating the available local resources among telecommunications applications that are associated with the user;
• means for providing an application program interface (API) to a telecommunications applications that enables the telecommunications application to communicate with underlying hardware and remote systems, where the API further automatically compensates for a change in the underlying hardware such that the telecommunications application continues to communicate with the underlying hardware without change to the telecommunications application;
• means for re-allocating available local resources in response to an imbalance between telecommunications-related resources allocated and telecommunications-related resources consumed;
• and
• means for requesting and receiving resources from a remote system in response to an inadequacy in locally available resources.