Irish-Swedish firm to dominate telephony software

TWO HIGHLY specialised telecoms software vendors have decided to merge their talents to attack the telecoms provider software sector.

In effect, Sweden's Appium has been blended into Belfast's Aepona. The combined company will have a client list that their rivals would kill for.

Customers include top level comms companies including France Telecom (Orange), BT, Sprint, Telus, Telefonica, KPN, Bharti, Telmex and Vimpelcom.

Analyst Jean-Charles with research firm, Ovum, commented, "This deal makes a lot of sense for both companies.

"Whilst it is clear that there is a significant and growing market opportunity for independent software vendors within the Service Platform segment, this can only be addressed by companies with real credibility in the marketplace."

In other words the market is going to be worth $1.4 billion in 2007 and will reach $3.2 billion by 2011, according to OSS Observer. So if you don't look big you could be in trouble as the Big Boys move in.

What Aepona has specialised in doing is making it easier for regular software developers to write apps which can then be sold onto telecoms providers.

Of course, there's no guarantee that the combined company won't be snapped up by a VC or major competitor. µ

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Aepona