Sun Microsystems has struck an alliance with Ericsson and Nokia to simplify technology integration for carriers by creating an open-standard, back-office platform that will reduce their costs.
The three companies will work together under the newly formed Telecommunications Platform Initiative to develop a standardized OSS for telecom operators.
'A community of organizations is coming together to build a middleware standard to reduce the time to market to deliver new servers,' said Sun VP of Global Communications Darrell Jordan-Smith. 'The new initiative helps carriers simplify platform management and reduces the costs and complexity of upgrades.'
He said the program is driven by 'the need to take cost out of provisioning services' for carriers and estimated it could reduce such costs by 15%-20% by stripping out maintenance and operating expenses.
He explained that under the new program, Sun will put together middleware which would act as a platform on which equipment providers could write applications for telco processes such as fault reporting, trouble ticketing or service creation.
Jordan-Smith added that the first products from the collaborative effort should be released by February 2007. Response from Sun's telecoms customers has been strongly positive, he said, because engaging in the collaborative effort should relieve platform development and integration challenges by bringing technology standardization across the industry.