Aepona hires new CEO, expands in US

27-03-2008

by Charlie Taylor

Belfast-based mobile software firm Aepona has appointed a new CEO and announced its further expansion into the North American market.

The company, which recently picked up the Best Service Delivery Platform title at the GSM Association's 13th annual Global Mobile Awards in Barcelona, said on Thursday that following recent success for its telecom web services solution in North America, it is to establish a new subsidiary, Aepona Inc which will be based in Denver, Colarado.

The company said that it would be hiring additional staff for its new subsidiary shortly.

Headquartered in Belfast and with offices in the UK, Sweden, North America and Asia, Aepona's solutions have been deployed by some of the world's leading mobile operators including Sprint, TELUS, Bell Canada, France Telecom/Orange, Vimpelcom, Bharti Airtel, BT and KPN.

Aepona's flagship telecom web services solution enables telcos to securely publish their network capabilities to the outside world as standards-based web services. This in turn allows third parties to 'telecom-enable' both web-based consumer services and enterprise applications, providing telcos with new revenue sources from existing assets as well as new routes to market.

Along with its expansion in the US and Canada, Aepona also announced it was appointing Al Snyder, a telecoms and IT industry veteran as its new chief executive officer.

Snyder, who has been a non-executive director of the company since May 2006 succeeds Brian Caulfield, who has been serving as interim Aepona CEO following the death of Isaac Olasoko in 2007.

Aepona's new chief executive has over 30 years of management experience in the high tech sector and his previous positions include CEO at Carrier Access, COO at Openwave, and other senior executive positions at Oracle and Digital Equipment Corporation.

"I'm very excited to be joining Aepona at this stage of the company's growth. It is already well established as a leader in the Service Layer market in Europe, and has started to build a strong footprint for its telecom web services offering in North America with Tier 1 carriers such as Sprint, TELUS and Bell Canada," said Snyder.

"With North America leading the way in the convergence of IT, Web 2.0 and telecoms, and the concept of open networks rapidly becoming a reality that telcos are having to adapt to, the timing is right for Aepona to establish a North American base to underpin the next phase of its growth," he added.