New functionality enables fast, easy creation and monetization of new API Services and Mashups

Mobile World Congress, BARCELONA, Spain – February 27, 2012 – Aepona, the software platform pioneer and global market leader in monetizing cloud and network services, today announced a major evolution of its Network as a Service (NaaS) solution with a new set of features, collectively termed Agile Service Enablement. Aepona’s NaaS solution allows service providers to implement a multi-sided business model through exposing, managing and monetizing their core network assets to external partners as easy-to-use APIs, opening up new channels to market and creating new revenue streams.

Aepona’s Network as a Service Solution now comprises Agile Service Enablement, Telecom Web Services, Payments and Settlement Engine and Partner Management Engine. These components are integrated as the API Monetization Platform, which is an evolution of Aepona’s award-winning Universal Service Platform. The platform has been deployed by multiple Service Providers globally for their Network as a Service offerings, including Rogers, Neustar, Telus, Bell Canada, TDC and Sprint, as well as by the GSMA for its OneAPI Canadian commercial service. Aepona also announced today its selection by Belgacom for its BeOpen API service.

The new Agile Service Enablement features allow service providers to quickly and easily create API services and mashups through configuration, rather than programming, meaning fast time to revenue and complete flexibility in service creation. New API services that combine core service provider assets, such as communications, network control, billing and context-awareness, with external APIs from web service providers, enterprises, content providers and merchants, can be rapidly composed and launched, and new functionality easily added as the service evolves.

Agile Service Enablement can also be used in conjunction with legacy service delivery platforms to add functionality to pre-existing APIs, such as policy, authorization and charging for their use by partners. This provides investment protection for service providers that wish to evolve their API services without costly re-engineering of their legacy platforms, providing a future-proof, flexible environment for rapid service creation and monetization.

Thanks to the close integration between Agile Service Enablement and Aepona’s Payments and Settlement Engine, another component of Aepona’s Network as a Service solution, services created within Agile Service Enablement can be monetized in multiple ways, according to the business relationship between the service provider and the partner, and the type of application consuming the service. Policies and charging rules can be applied on a per-partner and/or per-application basis, giving the service provider the flexibility to create innovative, attractive business models that are aligned with partners’ commercial models, allowing them to move away from the “one size fits all” approach of the past.

“Agile Service Enablement allows Aepona’s Service Provider customers to better serve the needs of their partners, to differentiate their API services from their competitors, and to monetize their core assets in multiple ways,” said Richard McConnell, Aepona’s Chief Technology Officer. “An increasing number of service providers, such as mobile operators, multiple system operators, and cloud service providers, are opening up their core assets to external partners such as developers, enterprises and merchants, but are now looking beyond standard services such as messaging, location and payments. They want to offer more sophisticated API services that leverage their unique assets in new ways, and to combine these assets with external services to add even greater utility and value to partners. Agile Service Enablement gives them the flexibility and freedom to do this, gets them to market quickly, and most importantly, enables new revenue-generating solutions that drive their businesses forward”.

In a separate release issued today, Aepona also announced its new Services Aggregation and Merchandizing platform, which allows service providers to aggregate, merchandize and deliver a range of cloud services, digital products and physical goods to customers. Together, Aepona’s API Monetization Platform and Services Aggregation and Merchandizing solutions allow service providers to add network value to cloud services in order to differentiate their offerings from competing service providers. For example, they can leverage network features made available by the API Monetization Platform, such as quality of service control, voice communications and contextual intelligence, to provide additional features and utility to the cloud services that they deliver through the Services Aggregation and Merchandizing platform.