NEC Corp. this week announced the strengthening of its Next Generation Network (NGN) activities as an organizer of the “NGN Middleware Partner Program” in cooperation with 11 IT vendors. The partnership program was first established one year ago to capitalize on the possibilities of NGN services.
This new announcement reinforces three points of development: establishment of an application partnership category; creation of new services in cooperation with partners; and establishment of international standards.
More specifically:
- Establishment of an Application Partnership Category
An application partnership category will be established, in addition to the existing middleware partnership category, in order to produce new applications and services that capitalize on NGN. Companies participating in the new category include Anritsu Networks Co., Ltd., Empirix, K. K., Cisco Systems G.K., Shobunsha Publications Inc. and Genesys Japan Co., Ltd.
- Creation of New Services in Cooperation With Partners
NEC works with program partners in order to cooperatively propose and test a variety of new services that capitalize on each company’s strengths to create NGN based solutions. Solutions that utilize NGN’s core session/QoS functions and solutions that are based on NGN middleware Application Programming Interfaces (API) are currently being completed.
- Establishment of International Standards
The first versions of NGN middleware APIs have already been produced for internal use among program partners. As a result, the charging/billing portion of the API set was proposed as an amendment to the Parlay Service Access (PSA) specifications at the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) in February 2009. Moreover, NEC and program partners cooperatively proposed the establishment of new Next Generation Service Interfaces (NGSI) at the OMA in order to create architecture and specifications for next generation network service APIs.
