Sun Microsystems Teams with Ericsson and Nokia to Form the "Telecommunications Platform Initiative"

Initiative Aims to Simplify Technology Integration for Operators and Service Providers

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced at the HONG KONG ITU TELECOM WORLD 2006, a new global cooperation with Ericsson and Nokia that aims to unite the Network Equipment Provider (NEP) community and assist telecommunications operators and service providers. Coming together as the Telecommunications Platform Initiative, members are jointly developing the requirements for a standardized, integrated telecommunications technology platform to simplify technology integration by enabling design, development and supply chain efficiencies.

"Ericsson is pleased to be a part of this collaborative community which is bringing us together to advance the industry as a whole," said Torbjorn Lundahl, Vice President of Ericsson Multimedia Systems. "With the backing of key NEPs and the advantage of Sun's community-building experience and in-depth understanding of open technologies, I am confident that this effort will lead to a much stronger industry alignment and bring major benefits to our customers."

Jyrki Holmala, Vice President, OSS Software, Networks, Nokia said: "The Telecommunications Platform Initiative recognizes that technology integration is a common challenge for all NEPs and shows our willingness to work together to find cost-efficient and open standards-based solutions for the industry. There is an excellent fit with Nokia's Operations Support Systems (OSS) middleware strategy and our Open EMS Suite platform product roadmaps."

Sun, Ericsson and Nokia Step Up to Benefit Industry

To succeed in today's competitive telecommunications market, operators must constantly find new ways to bring services to market more quickly while simultaneously boosting subscriber revenues. Sun, Ericsson and Nokia jointly recognized the industry need for a common platform infrastructure that would provide a uniform foundation to help address these market pressures. By collaborating on a series of publicly available requirements documents for the Operations, Administration and Management Layer (OA&M) and Service Layer environments, the members of this Initiative will provide the broader telecommunications industry with new alternatives to improve time to service, time to market and ultimately, time to revenues.

"We are faced with huge integration issues today when we purchase solutions from multiple NEPs," said Javier Gutierrez, Enablers Development Senior Manager of Telefónica Moviles España. "The results of the newly formed Telecommunications Platform Initiative will help us simplify platform management, allowing us to focus more on rapidly launching innovative services for our customers."

NEP Community Backs Initiative

By coming together to jointly define industry platform requirements, the NEPs benefit from greater freedom to focus more resources on their core competencies. The members of the Telecommunications Platform Initiative are defining and developing an architecture that will be easily adaptable to a wide range of applications.

"The feedback from our telecommunications customers on this new initiative has been extremely positive," said Peter Ewens, Vice President, OEM Business, Sun Microsystems. "Leading OEMs like Nokia and Ericsson are excited to see Sun step up and engage in a collaborative community effort to relieve some of their platform development and integration challenges through technology standardization across the industry."

Sun and the members of this Initiative will continue to be actively involved with other standardization and specification bodies such as PICMG (www.picmg.org) and SCOPE (http://www.scope-alliance.org).