IBM opens global telecom dev centers

IBM this week announced new development centers around the globe to help telecom operators develop new services that fit within today’s evolving communications business models.

Three standalone development centers will be located in China, South Africa and Malaysia. A fourth, in partnership with vendor Comverse, will set up shop in France.

The centers will focus on helping providers build new applications and services based on IBM’s Service Provider Delivery Environment 3.0 framework and will encompass software and hardware from a variety of business partners, IBM said.

Setting up global development centers has become standard practice for large telecom vendors, enabling them to handle local development needs but also in some cases to offer outsourced operational services as well.

The IBM Telecommunications Solution Center in China will operate as a subset of IBM’s already established China Development Labs. Among the work already underway there including efforts by China Mobile to deploy a new service creation platform.

IBM’s South Africa location, in Johannesburg, will serve all of Sub-Sahara Africa, IBM said. But Africa is also served by three additional solution center locations in Nairobi, Lagos and Cape Town. Among the work being done at the South Africa location is a proof of concept solution called "The Enterprise Applications for IMS + SDP for Mobile Healthcare" – which showcases how the health care industry can use standards-based telecom applications to improve the delivery of medical services.

IBM is opening a third center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Finally, the new Comverse Center of Excellence will work within the IBM Telecom Solutions Lab in France. The center will focus on BSS/OSS and service delivery platform solutions support.