Aepona moves towards IMS with call continuity, cash and customer
Irish start-up and service delivery platform vendor Aepona is expanding its converged services presence into IMS territory with a new solution for cellular to Wi-Fi roaming, based on the 3GPP Voice Call Continuity (VCC) specifications. AePona's move into a crowded market is buttressed by a new £10m round of funding and a parallel deal with Canadian operator Telus to provide telecom web services.
The ability to roam between cellular and Wi-Fi networks is a key component of FMC services, and is already enabled by various dual mode technologies including UMA as deployed by operators like British Telecom, Orange and Telecom Italia. However, existing solutions have limitations and are only an interim step, says Michael Crossey, Aepona VP Marketing, as he explains his company's embrace of VCC call handover technology.
"UMA is not a SIP solution. In the future when operators want multimedia services SIP is fundamental. VCC is much more future-proof from that perspective. UMA is a pragmatic way to get to market quickly and VCC is longer term and standardised within the 3GPP."
Crossey argues that operators pursuing IMS are taking a service-led approach, that IMS is driven by applications, as operators move step-by-step towards delivering services like cellular-Wi-Fi handoff. He has strong backing from Jean-Charles Doineau, Service Infrastructure Practice Leader at research firm Ovum.
"Cellular to Wi-Fi roaming based on the VCC specifications will be one of the main initial drivers for operators to implement IMS in their networks," says Doineau. "Many operators are taking a service-led approach towards adopting IMS, and our research indicates that both fixed and mobile operators view VCC as being a strategically important element of their fixed-mobile convergence strategies."
Aepona's VCC solution, which will be demonstrated at 3GSM next week, is built on the company's Universal Service Platform, which has been deployed with operators including the France Telecom / Orange Group, Sprint, Vimpelcom and KPN. The new VCC solution is expected to be commercially available for trials later this year.
Although this is Aepona's first explicitly IMS-focussed product, the company has IMS pedigree. The Universal Service Platform already fulfills the role of key IMS components (OSA Gateway, IM-SSF and SCIM) and both the Network Abstraction and Service Interaction capabilities of the Universal Service Platform are encompassed in the 3GPP reference architecture for IMS.
"From an application perspective, yes, this is our first explicit IMS product. But we have had the core technology, SCIM and SIP, for some time," says Crossey. "We realised in the VCC standardisation process that we had a lot of the technology needed to implement multiparty call control, user status, and so VCC was a fairly straightforward thing to realise."
And VCC capability is not the be all and end all, believes Aepona, which is entering a crowded market and, not surprisingly, wants to draw attention away from the call handover technology, which is where "Bridgeport and Accuris and Nortel and Siemens have been focussing on," according to Crossey.
Aepona wants to differentiate on managing and controlling call routing decisions, figuring out how to apply intelligent rating and charging to calls that move between the Wi-Fi and cellular domains, and ensuring the interoperability of value-added services between these domains, as Crossey explains.
"The more challenging part is how the operator applies different tariffing through the same call, to rate the call at one point during the cellular part and zero rate during the Wi-Fi part and go back to the cellular domain, and treat that all as a single call. There is a danger the customer could end up with three call charges.
"Another thing is give operators intelligent routing, the current VCC specs talk about routing based on signal strength, but an operator may want to, in a Wi-Fi area, keep the call in the cellular domain. It is important to have that intelligence.
"The third area is interaction, such as the ability to offer services to prepay. VCC and prepay are both services that require control of the call. If you have VCC or VPN service both need to be integrated into prepay and that is something that we can enable."
Aepona has other strings to its bow, which have attracted Canadian mobile operator Telus. Aepona has seen off competition from IT world competitors like BEA Systems and HP to provide telecom web services for Telus' next generation network, applying Parlay X network abstraction capability to enable non-telecoms application developers to design to the network.
"The core value proposition is that we are providing a common service layer that shields application developers from the complexity of the underlying network whether SIP or SS7," explains Crossey, who goes on to outline his new customer's strategy.
"Telus' ambition is to expose the capabilities of its network and charge applications developers or enterprise customers for that access...Like the Google Maps idea where you have an open API people can work on. Telus is bringing that into the telecoms space."
As for Aepona's overall strategy, Crossey sums it up succinctly:
"We are focussed longer term on moving further into the IMS FMC convergence space and in the shorter term we are looking to take a lead in the web services space, network capability exposure. Both are sides of the same coin if you like."
That strategy is now backed by a new financing round of $10m. Existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Polaris Ventures and Trinity Venture Capital all participated in the round. The new funding follows previous rounds in 2003 and 2005, bringing the total investment in the company to $45m.
