Aepona, a global provider of telecoms software products and services headquartered in Belfast, United Kingdom, that recently merged with Appium, a leading technology vendor offering Telecom Application Server and Service Creation Environment products based in Malmö, Sweden, has announced its participation in Microsoft’s Connected Services Sandbox. The Connected Services Sandbox is an initiative to help promote the development of innovative customer solutions that merge traditional telecommunications offerings such as voice or text messaging with Web 2.0 applications such as mapping or search.

Aepona will demonstrate an example of a service created in the Sandbox at NXTcomm 2007 in Chicago, June 19-21, 2007 at the Microsoft Connected Services Sandbox booth #5840. The demonstration will illustrate the power of Telecom Web Services and the ease of programming within an SOA architecture based on Microsoft Connected Services Framework. The Aepona demonstration showcases the enhancement of an established e-mail direct marketing platform with telecoms features, specifically a toll-free “Call Me” button that encourages direct real-time communication between the consumer and the merchant, greatly increasing the probability of closing a sale. From the perspective of a telecoms operator, this feature can be offered to enterprises as a managed direct marketing service with additional revenues being generated by the high-value sales calls that are initiated by the consumer and paid for by the enterprise.

“The Connected Services Sandbox is a valuable program to demonstrate the power of Telecom Web Services” said Michael Crossey, Aepona’s VP of Marketing. “Aepona’s Telecom Web Services solution gives operators the opportunity to evolve their business towards the “Telco 2.0” model, where they can expose network capabilities that allow service mashups to be created by a broad community of application developers from the Internet world. These service mashups are often specialised, targeted services that appeal to the “long tail” of customers and will collectively generate more revenue at higher margins than the traditional narrow set of mass-market services. We are delighted to be working with Microsoft as we continue to promote the vision of a new Telco business model enabled by Telecom Web Services”.

“The Connected Services Sandbox plays a key role in helping operators fulfill the promise of Telco 2.0, where traditional telecommunications offerings merge with the innovative technologies and services found in the Web 2.0 world,” said Michael O’Hara, general manager for the Communications Sector at Microsoft. “Operators have an opportunity to deliver hundreds, if not thousands, of new revenue-generating services to their customers in this new telecom order. This is a vision that is shared by key enabling platform vendors such as Aepona, and we are pleased to welcome them as a partner in this important initiative.”

For more information about the Connected Services Sandbox, please visit http://www.networkmashups.com.