SINGAPORE -- Aepona, the leading supplier of products and solutions for the Service Network to telecoms operators globally, today announced the repositioning of its current product portfolio as the Universal Service Platform. At the same time, the company unveiled its Multi-Line service, the first of a series of new applications hosted by the Universal Service Platform.

“Back in April 2006, we announced the first step in our evolution towards becoming a more applications-led provider of solutions for the Service Network through building relationships with a number of application provider partners,” said Isaac Olasoko, Aepona’s CEO. “Now we are embarking upon the next phase of that strategy by bringing a number of Aepona-developed applications directly to market to complement the externally-hosted services that our partners are providing. The key enabler for all of these applications is the Universal Service Platform which subsumes the functionality of our existing marketing-leading Causeway and C-SIM products and which will be further developed in line with our customers’ requirements and the needs of the market as a whole.”

The Aepona Universal Service Platform contains a rich set of network capabilities allowing a broad range of rapidly deployable, profitable services to be introduced by mobile, fixed-line and converged telecoms operators. It enables new operator business models by allowing network-hosted applications to be combined with externally hosted applications, accessed via Web Services, on the same platform.

One of these network-hosted applications is Aepona’s Multi-Line service, also being announced today. Multi-Line provides two separate phone numbers on the same handset and SIM card, giving operators a compelling value proposition to increase ARPU and enhance customer loyalty. The Multi-Line service allows separate service packages and billing plans on each line, making it a highly attractive service for enterprise customers who want to provide their employees with a mobile phone that provides value-added enterprise services, such as VPN, billed under a monthly contract, but that also allows for personal use on a separate prepaid account.

“In talking with our customers, we have found that there are certain categories of application that they want Aepona to take the lead in developing,” said Michael Crossey, Aepona’s VP of marketing. “These include applications, such as Multi-Line, that are resident in the network and require deep knowledge of telecoms protocols to develop and implement. Our Universal Service Platform gives the operator the ability to start with one service, and then up-sell a range of other ready-to-deploy applications to the same set of customers, keeping the incremental service launch costs to a minimum.”

Aepona Ltd.