Aepona boosts its open service delivery platform with Valista buy
Published: 7 July, 2009
The wireless service delivery platform (SDP) market has been a volatile one in the past few years, and Aepona is one of the independents which is determined to hold out against the majors battling from the telco and enterprise sectors. Its challenge to the likes of Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent from the one side, and Oracle and IBM from the other, is based around adopting open APIs and web services. But another important way to lure operators will be providing an end-to-end solution, and to that end, Aepona has plugged a gap in its offering by acquiring fellow Irish software house Valista, for its payments and settlements system.
"Open network APIs are our space," commented Aepona's VP of marketing, Michael Crossey. "We have a good technology for network abstraction and for third party relationship management. The missing link was technology for monetization and billing."
Aepona will add Valista's products and managed services, which specialize in allowing wired and wireless operators to manage their content and commerce partners, including the provisioning and merchandizing of apps, and the payments, settlement and customer care services. This will form part of the larger firm's 'network as a service' (NaaS) approach, which Crossey says is clearly differentiated from major vendors' attempts to move into the 'telco 2.0' world, where traditional telecoms and media business models meet open web services.
Ericsson recently announced its open framework and APIs, aiming to be a 'broker' for a wide range of carrier services, but Crossey argues it is still tied to one network infrastructure and driven by the need to sell major core network equipment. ALU has moved further towards open network access, as part of its ambitious telco 2.0 strategy, but Crossey says it has fewer monetization capabilities as yet, while the main players from the enterprise IT space, Oracle and IBM (Microsoft pulled out last year) have less history in the network layer, despite their strengths in web services.
"The move towards openness initially focused on the device side, but over the past year attention has shifted towards the network side", said Aepona's CEO Al Snyder. "Aepona has secured several contracts with Tier one operators to implement their Open Network API programs." Aepona customers include Orange, Sprint, Vimpelcom, Bharti Airtel, Telus, BT and KPN. It also provides the reference implementation platform for the GSMA's One API initiative, and Crossey expects operators to start moving their own web services frameworks - such as Orange Partner - to One API compliance in 6-12 months.
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