The Parlay Group was a technical industry consortium (founded 1998, ended around 2007) that specified APIs for the telephone network.
Parlay APIs include: call control, conferencing, user interaction (audio and text messaging, SMS/MMS), and billing.
A major goal of the APIs is to be independent of the underlying telephony network technology (e.g. CDMA, GSM, landline SS7).
The Parlay X web services include Third Party Call Control (3PCC), location and simple payment.
Parlay is somewhat related to JAIN, and is currently (early 2003) completely unrelated to the Service Creation Community.
The Framework also allows applications to discover the capabilities of the network, and provides management functions for handling fault and overload situations.