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This article, written by Doug Mohney, originally appeared in VON Magazine, March 22, 2006.
BEA Systems (www.bea.com) and MetaSwitch (www.metaswitch.com) were both busy at Spring VON 2006 announcing partnerships and positioning themselves as forces to be reckoned with.
According to a company representative, BEA booked one billion dollars in revenue last year, with thirty percent of that coming from the telecommunications market. Best known for its WebLogic family of servers, BEA's WebLogic SIP Server is the converged J2EE and SIP servlet-based application server component of the BEA WebLogic Communications Platform, providing and integrated SIP, HTTP, EJB container for rapid deployment and delivery of converged multimedia applications.
With an army of over 800,000 developers worldwide, BEA prefers to build tools rather than applications and announced partnerships with Cantata and IP Unity to further solidify an IMS-based applications "story" for service providers. On the other hand, smaller applications developers that are also building applications for service providers may be feeling some discomfort from BEA's steady push into the telco space.
MetaSwitch was also busy announcing partnerships. Rodopi Software (www.rodopi.com) has partnered with MetaSwitch to ensure its back-office OSS and automation software works with MetaSwitch Class 4/5 softswitch, complementing billing integration announced last year. Integra5 has certified its delivery service platform (SDP) works with MetaSwitch's solutions after joint operability testing. Together, the two companies allow service providers to deliver a wide range of services across their networks without costly upgrades.
MetaSwitch was also busy promoting their Multimedia-Enhanced Telephony Architecture (META) initiative, defining a physical implementation of the IMS architecture that addresses legacy feature equivalence, service creation, integration with "digital lifestyle" multimedia devices, backoffice integration, and security. META also offers a real-world migration platform from the "legacy world" to pure IP.
Doug Mohney is News Editor for VON Magazine as well as a contributor to Mobile Radio Technology. Over the past decade he's experienced two Internet startups (DIGEX, SkyCache/Cidera) and written for tech publications from BOARDWATCH to The Inquirer.