HONG KONG – Sun Microsystems today announced it will work closely with telecom manufacturers Ericsson and Nokia to unite the network equipment provider (NEP) community and assist telecommunications operators and service providers.
Coming together as the Telecommunications Platform Initiative, members are jointly developing the requirements for a standardized, integrated telecommunications technology platform to simplify technology integration by enabling design, development and supply chain efficiencies, says the press release.
"Ericsson is pleased to be a part of this collaborative community which is bringing us together to advance the industry as a whole," said Torbjorn Lundahl, vice-president of Ericsson Multimedia Systems. "With the backing of key NEPs and the advantage of Sun’s community-building experience and in-depth understanding of open technologies, I am confident that this effort will lead to a much stronger industry alignment and bring major benefits to our customers."
"The Telecommunications Platform Initiative recognizes that technology integration is a common challenge for all NEPs and shows our willingness to work together to find cost-efficient and open standards-based solutions for the industry," added Jyrki Holmala, vice-president, OSS Software, Networks, Nokia. "There is an excellent fit with Nokia’s Operations Support Systems (OSS) middleware strategy and our Open EMS Suite platform product roadmaps."
In today’s telecom world, operators must constantly find new ways to bring services to market more quickly while simultaneously boosting subscriber revenues. "Sun, Ericsson and Nokia jointly recognized the industry need for a common platform infrastructure that would provide a uniform foundation to help address these market pressures. By collaborating on a series of publicly available requirements documents for the Operations, Administration and Management Layer (OA&M) and Service Layer environments, the members of this Initiative will provide the broader telecommunications industry with new alternatives to improve time to service, time to market and ultimately, time to revenues," outlines the press release.
"We are faced with huge integration issues today when we purchase solutions from multiple NEPs," said Javier Gutierrez, enablers development senior manager of Telefonica Moviles Espana. "The results of the newly formed Telecommunications Platform Initiative will help us simplify platform management, allowing us to focus more on rapidly launching innovative services for our customers."
By coming together to jointly define industry platform requirements, "the NEPs benefit from greater freedom to focus more resources on their core competencies. The members of the Telecommunications Platform Initiative are defining and developing an architecture that will be easily adaptable to a wide range of applications," reads the release.
Sun and the members of this Initiative will continue to be actively involved with other standardization and specification bodies such as PICMG (www.picmg.org) and SCOPE (www.scope-alliance.org).
