BEA Systems Teams With HP to Lead Industry Effort to Simplify Creation of IMS-based Services

BEA Systems Teams With HP to Lead Industry Effort to Simplify Creation of IMS-based Services

BEA Systems, Inc., a world leader in enterprise and communications infrastructure software, today announced that it is co-chairing a new Java Specification Request (JSR) with HP. The main objective of the proposed specification is to simplify the development process and reduce the effort required to build and deploy new telecommunications services. Ultimately, service providers will be able to accelerate service creation — and millions of subscribers will be able to enjoy exciting new multimedia services sooner rather than later.

The

collaborative standards work is designed to provide the developer community with an API that standardizes access to external media server resources from services built on Java application servers. While this standards effort is being led by BEA and HP, it is supported by a number of key members of the telecommunications community including leading media server companies, application companies, network equipment providers and service providers. For a complete list of supporters, please visit http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=309 .

BEA and HP have a long-standing strategic alliance in the telecommunications industry, initially in the OSS/BSS arena and more recently in the area of service delivery platforms. In 2006, the companies completed interoperability testing between BEA WebLogic SIP Server and the HP OpenCall Media Platform and the HP OpenCall Home Subscriber Server (HSS) solution. The companies’ joint work in support of a standardized approach to accessing external media server resources marks yet another milestone in the alliance between BEA and HP.

There is need today for an explicit media control API for application servers that can take advantage of the new media server capabilities now available. The Media Server Control API can enable developers to write and deploy media applications and services without in-depth knowledge of multiple media control protocols or proprietary APIs. Moreover, the proposed specification is designed to help solve call control and media manipulation for embedded telephony systems.

“We have enjoyed a close working relationship with the HP OpenCall team in developing unique application solutions for service providers,” said Mike McHugh, vice president and general manager, BEA WebLogic Communications Platform, BEA Systems. “The new JSR adds a standard API to write multimedia applications and services for both IP and converging networks, helping to further reinforce the portability and long-term viability of applications built with BEA and HP technology.”

“This new standard reaffirms HP commitment to industry standards and interoperability,” said Steven Dietch, director, worldwide OpenCall marketing, HP. “This is also is an important step in enabling easier creation of compelling multimedia services in both legacy and IMS environments. HP is pleased to work with BEA to coordinate so many capable companies and ultimately help service providers realize the benefits of their network infrastructure investments and deliver an improved customer experience to their subscribers.”

JSR 309 has received broad industry support from a host of leading telecommunications companies:

“Atos Origin promotes standardization on JSR 309 as making much easier operability between systems of various providers and technologies,” said Etienne Paul, Solution Manager, Telecom Service Platform Domain of Atos Origin, an integrator and developer of service applications for most of the tier 1 operators in Europe. “The main benefits are cost-effectiveness, the decrease of development effort and quick time-to-market for new services.”

“Cantata applauds BEA Systems’ JSR 309 Media Server Control API initiative,” said Andrew Bezaitis, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Cantata. “Today’s announcement represents an important technological milestone that can significantly enhance the accessibility of advanced media processing functions, and fuel widespread creation of exciting, media-rich applications.”

“Huawei’s services can be deployed on any of the media servers developed by our R&D staff,” said Xiaoguang Tang, Director IMS, Application and Software at Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., the largest IMS/NGN telecom solution provider in Asia. “We truly believe that a common media control API can help us provide flexible solutions to our customers.”

“RadiSys is pleased to support BEA’s Media Server Control API JSR project because of the simplicity and standardization it can bring to the control of media servers/MRFPs for enhanced services,” said Grant Henderson, Vice President of Product Marketing at RadiSys. “The new API can allow application developers to make use of powerful media processing as easily as they send a SIP INVITE today. We believe that the combination of the BEA WebLogic SIP Server, RadiSys’ family of Convedia Media Servers and the new Media Server Control API will be a winning one.”

“One of the challenges in creating multimedia services lies in controlling media servers effectively,” said Ilhan Bagoren, CTO at Telenity, a leading provider of next generation converged services platforms and applications for communications networks. “We are committed to standards for value-added services and our overarching goal is to achieve levels of abstraction and control over the entire range of media server capabilities.”

For more information about JSR 309, please visit http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=309 . For more information about BEA WebLogic SIP Server, and the BEA WebLogic Communications Platform, please visit http://www.bea.com/sip and http://www.bea.com/wlcom , respectively.

The BEA WebLogic Communications Platform product family, including BEA WebLogic SIP Server, is a key component of the BEA SOA 360 platform. Announced in September at BEAWorld 2006 in San Francisco, the BEA SOA 360 platform is designed to deliver the industry’s most unified SOA platform and spans all three of BEA’s product families, AquaLogic(R), WebLogic(R), Tuxedo and the company’s newly unveiled SOA collaborative tooling environment, BEA Workspace 360. (See Sept. 19, 2006, press release titled “BEA Announces SOA 360; Industry’s most unified SOA Platform to transform and optimize business.”)

About BEA Systems, Inc.

BEA Systems, Inc. is a world leader in enterprise and communications infrastructure software. BEA’s SOA 360 platform is the industry’s most unified SOA platform for business transformation and optimization, in order to improve cost structures and grow new revenue streams. Information about how BEA is enabling customers to achieve Business LiquidITy(TM) can be found at bea.com.

For More Information: bea.com/news + 1 408-570-8004 Partner Quotes AtosOrigin

“Atos Origin integrates and develops service applications for most of tier 1 operators in Europe, both on application servers (in particular BEA/WLSS) and on media servers (in particular HP/OCMP). Atos Origin promotes standardization JSR309 as making easier operability between systems (AS and MS) of various providers and technologies. Main benefits are cost effectiveness, decrease of development effort and quick time-to-market. This will also facilitate rich media applications and fix-mobile convergence services deployment.”

– Etienne Paul, Solution Manager Telecom Service Platform Domain, AtosOrigin etienne.paul {at} atosorigin(.)com

BLStream

“Mobile blogging, photo and video communities are becoming very central for telco and media companies. Our moblogging platform Blogia, running on Bea Weblogic SIP, provides our customers with versatile solutions empowered by SIP-based community features and user-generated content. The chosen technical architecture is also future proof: BEA’s JSR Media Control API will enable seamless access to any media server our customers might choose.”

– Samuli Koski – Lammi, CEO, BLStream samuli.koski-lammi {at} blstream(.)com Cantata

“Cantata Technology, developer of the SnowShore IP Media Server, has been a long-term proponent and author of standards for media servers. Cantata applauds BEA Systems’ JSR 309 Media Server Control API initiative. The availability of a protocol-agnostic API for media server control will enable service providers and enterprises to rapidly deliver and deploy media-rich voice and video applications with IVR, conferencing and speech recognition features. Today’s announcement represents an important technological milestone that will significantly enhance the accessibility of advanced media processing functions, and fuel widespread creation of exciting, media-rich applications.”

– Andrew Bezaitis, Senior Vice President, Business Development, Cantata abezaitis {at} cantata(.)com

Ericpol

“Ericpol supports the BEA JSR initiative for control API from SIP AS to MRF since it impacts IMS services time-to-market and simplifies the SIP servlet programming model.

Based on our BEA video conference and prepaid implementation and integration experience, we find this a major step forward for the developer community.”

– Maciej Mroczek, CEO, Ericpol Mroczek {at} ericpol(.)com Gintel

“Gintel develops service applications targeted at services for business subscribers. We are working in an application server domain and standardized APIs in the AS, giving us access to the full functionality of network elements like media servers, without having to handle the complexity of each and every individual protocol, would both make it easier and more cost-effective to develop applications.

“We can also closely follow the development in multi-media functionality of media servers and making those features available in service applications without having to create many variants of our applications depending on the actual media server being used. This should ensure that functionally rich media servers show their full potential to end customers.”

– Tore Saeter, CEO, Gintel Tore {at} gintel(.)com Huawei

“Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is the largest IMS/NGN telecom solution provider in the Asia Pacific market. Huawei’s services are able to be deployed for all the 3 to 4 types of media servers developed by our R&D staff. We truly believe that a common media control API can help us provide flexible solutions to our customers.”

– Xiaoguang Tang, Director IMS – Application and Software Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. xg_tang {at} huawei(.)com ICT Solutions

“ICT Solutions develops SIP-based applications for all-IP networks. We typically help operators to migrate existing platforms and build new service- oriented solutions based on IMS. We believe it is essential to offer a framework with standardized high-level enabling services. Standardization of enabling services such as media control is considered to be essential for this approach.

“Developers will need this in order to create reusable service building blocks. In that sense the Media Server Control API will directly contribute to our service enabling framework. Application developers can concentrate on application-level features instead of details involved with IVR’s, conferencing or text-to-speech. This is exactly what we had in mind when we designed our model-driven Service Creation Environment (SCE).”

– Tony Sloos, CTO, ICT Solutions tony.sloos {at} ict(.)nl Intervoice

“Intervoice has been delivering complex call processing and enhanced services applications for fixed line and wireless carriers for more than 20 years and has been an innovator in the industry’s transition to standards- based deployment platforms. We strongly support open standards and are excited to be part of the JSR309 specification development. This standard compliments a growing list of standards and underscores the maturing state of the industry. Interoperability based on well-defined functional partitioning allows Intervoice to innovate at the delivery platform and application tier technologies and provides our customers with more choice in and leverage of their investments.”

– Mike Polcyn, CTO, Intervoice mike.polcyn {at} intervoice(.)com Iperia

“Iperia endorses the JSR 309 proposal. This proposal, once implemented, will allow Iperia to continue to enhance and offer our solutions on various best-of-breed media servers, thus allowing greater flexibility.”

– Art Leondires, COO and EVP of Products, Iperia aleondires {at} iperia(.)com IP Unity Glenayre

“The new abstraction layer standard will benefit from the SIP container agnostic Mereon Media Control Interface (MCI) and Mereon Media Application Framework (MAF) layers developed by IP Unity Glenayre, the new leader in delivering carrier-grade messaging and multimedia solutions. It will enable IP

Unity Glenayre to offer an expanded portfolio of partner developed media rich services utilizing the audio, video and data primitives offered by Mereon Media Server.”

– Piyush Modi, Senior VP of Engineering, IP Unity Piyush.Modi {at} ip-unity(.)com

NMS Communications

“NMS Communications is a leading provider of media processing technologies and platforms for audio and video applications which support a large community of application developers. BEA’s JSR 309 initiative will allow application developers to utilize our real-time processing technology in a Java environment using an open and well-known standard API. This is crucial as it reduces time-to-market for developing new media-rich applications without detailed expertise in a variety of protocols for controlling media resources.”

– Anupama Hegde, Senior Director of Product Management NMS Communications anupama_hegde {at} nmss(.)com

RADISYS

“As the global leading provider of media servers, RadiSys is pleased to support BEA’s Media Server Control API JSR project because of the simplicity and standardization it will bring to the control of media servers/MRFPs for enhanced services. The new API will allow application developers to make use of powerful media processing as easily as they send a SIP INVITE today. We believe that the combination of the BEA WLSS, RadiSys’ family of Convedia Media Servers and the new Media Server Control API will be a winning one.”

– Grant Henderson, VP Product Marketing, RadiSys grant.henderson {at} radisys(.)com

RADVISION

“RADVISION is pleased to play an active role in defining JSR 309. We believe that the standardization of the SIP Application Server API for media server (IMS MRF) communications will fuel the growth, availability and variety of interactive rich multimedia services in next generation IMS networks. RADVISION delivers to the market an IMS-compliant Media Resource Function (MRF), based on the SCOPIATM Interactive Video Platform, enabling easy development and rapid deployment of advanced interactive video applications, as well as a suite of exciting, ready-to-deploy visual communication applications, thus making the JSR 309 initiative valuable to RADVISION and the IMS market.”

– Alon Barnea, General Manager of the Mobility & Service Provider Business Unit, Radvision, alonb {at} radvision(.)com

Telenity

“One of the challenges in creating multimedia services lies in controlling media servers effectively. We are committed to standards for value-added services (VAS) and our overarching goal is to achieve high levels of abstraction and control over the entire range of media server capabilities, pretty much the same way the Java JDBC API provides for the database access.”

– Ilhan Bagoren, CTO, Telenity ilhanb {at} telenity(.)com Vantrix

“Vantrix is a leading solution provider of digital media services, addressing the optimized delivery of rich media content including messaging, marketing, downloads and live streaming across IP and mobile networks. Our media gateway, SPOTxde LIVE, will greatly benefit from JSR309. We fully expect that this standard will facilitate inter-operability tests between gateways and applications, leading the way to an increasingly rapid introduction of rich applications for converged services.”

– Jean Mayrand, CEO, Vantrix jean.mayrand {at} vantrix(.)com Xentronik

“This API is very interesting to application developers like us that today need to support a variety of different media server technologies and control protocols. We currently have to choose the vendor and technology against which to develop our applications. The Media Server Control API would allow us to have a common approach to most vendors and technologies, thereby greatly lowering our redesign and customization costs.”

– Troels Petersen, CTO, Xentronik troels.petersen {at} xentronik(.)dk ZTE

“JSR 309 provides a portable interface to create media-rich applications, thereby greatly lowering our redesign and customization costs.”

– Zhen Jiang Dong, Senior Director Engineer, Network & Service Product Line, ZTE