Aepona, a supplier of application solutions and services to telecoms service providers has announced that it is working with BEA Systems, a world leader in communications infrastructure software innovation, to enhance customers’ network capabilities and increase the availability of next-generation applications and services.

Kieran Dalton from Aepona said: “By enabling our Parlay OSA Gateway and BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper to work together, we can provide many advantages for our customers. They can now use both the telecom network integration capabilities of the Aepona product while taking advantage of BEA’s focus on Web Services policy control. This can help improve customers’ ability to provide managed exposure of telecom network capabilities and can extend their networks’ reach to a broader set of applications.

The two companies have successfully completed interoperability testing between Aepona Parlay OSA Gateway and BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper™, a standards-based service access and partner relationship management product. With the completion of this interoperability testing, Aepona and BEA are solidifying their partnership by providing products that can be used for an integrated telecom network solution. Network operators can now feel confident that Aepona’s and BEA’s joint offering is designed to interoperate out of-the-box across telecom services.

“The partnership between BEA and Aepona has resulted in tangible benefits for all involved. Making our two products interoperable can strengthen our place in the market and help to ensure that our customers really can have it all,” said Dalton.

“In today’s competitive environment, customers are looking for flexible, off-the-shelf products that can leverage existing network assets and can help drive increased subscriber revenue,” said Mike McHugh, vice president and general manager, BEA WebLogic Communications Platform. “The combination of BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper and Aepona Parlay OSA Gateway is designed to deliver customers policy secured web services with robust network integration capabilities, further merging network and IT technologies to offer robust telecom service access solutions.”

Aepona’s OSA Gateway provides an abstract view of a telecommunications network and allows individual capabilities to be exploited through a standard Java API. Built using a service-oriented architecture (SOA), Aepona’s gateway offers a service capability view of the network and provides a future-proof framework for a new generation of applications and services.

BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper is the telecommunications industry’s only carrier-grade, standards-based platform designed to integrate policy enforcement, Telecom Web Services, and third party partner management. BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper 2.2, the latest version unveiled in June 2006 is designed to deliver new Telecom Web Services and native network application interfaces that can help network operators increase revenue from new, third-party services. With this product, BEA can help network operators safely expose their network assets to developers through an SOA-based architecture, using Telecom Web Services that can implement a range of capabilities such as call routing, text messaging, and billing. This network access, in turn, can help operators increase revenue from both new messaging and location-based services, as well as services from existing legacy networks.

BEA Systems and Aepona continue to work together on targeted customer engagements using the wide range of products and services within their portfolios. For more information about BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper, and the BEA WebLogic Communications Platform, please visit http://bea.com/gatekeeper and http://bea.com/wlcom, respectively.

About Aepona
Aepona’s products and services deliver next generation applications to communications services providers today and as they transition to next generation networks such as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). The company is headquartered in Northern Ireland with offices worldwide.

Aepona has been chosen by blue chip operators, such as Orange, Sprint Nextel, E-Plus, VimpelCom and Bridge Mobile Alliance in Asia for applications and Web services solutions using Aepona’s products and services.

As part of Aepona’s belief in a service layer-driven evolution to IMS, Aepona’s open architecture protects operators’ investment in legacy networks while migrating to an IMS platform. Customer services are hosted in a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) environment yet delivered through the existing legacy network, giving customers the best of both worlds.