Aepona Unveils Cloud Services Brokerage Platform

Aepona announced a cloud services brokerage platform, an enhancement to its network as a service solution, and two new service provider customers this week at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) in Barcelona, Spain.

The new cloud services brokerage solution, known as SAM for services aggregation and merchandizing platform, targets carriers that want to expand their product portfolios by partnering with cloud services providers. To enable that, SAM handles settlements between service providers and their third-party cloud solution partners, helps with the creation of catalogs of services, puts together different product promotions and bundles of cloud-based services, manages order management and fulfillment, and more.

Michael Crossey, Aepona’s vice president of marketing, tells TMCnet that SAM was designed to help service providers easily bring into their bundles new cloud services to allow them to upsell their core services by adding to them a range of third-party value-added services.

Service providers can elect to install and operate SAM as part of their own networks, or they can purchase it via a software-as-a-service model.

Crossey says SAM was developed several years ago for a North American service provider, which has been using the platform for four to five years. Now Aepona has productized the platform to make it available to all service providers.

On a separate front, as noted above, Aepona is introducing what it calls a major evolution of its Network as a Service (NaaS) solution. With this new evolution, NaaS now offers service providers the ability to create mashups leveraging functionality from both their own networks as well as from third parties.

The company introduced NaaS a while back, offering facilities-based service providers a platform through which to expose their network resources to third-party developers through a set of application programming interfaces. Aepona’s NaaS solution is in use by many service providers, including Bell Canada (News - Alert), Neustar, Rogers, Sprint, TDC, and Telus.

In other news from Aepona this week, the company is announcing wins with at least two new customers. The first is Belgacom (News - Alert), which has tapped Aepona to provide its API Monetization Platform for the carrier’s BeOpen API initiative, through which Belgacom’s core network assets will be made available to its partners as web services-based APIs. The second new Aepona customer will be made public on Tuesday.