While the big issue on its plate these days may be the pending — and still controversial — merger with Oracle, BEA Systems has its hands full in the carrier market as well. Pushing forward with its service delivery platform message, BEA is helping providers worldwide transform their service capabilities.

Christopher King, senior director of worldwide telco markets for BEA, highlighted BEA's deep roots in telecom, starting with the acquisition of transaction engine Tuxedo (originally built at Bell Labs), which runs many carrier operations support system/business support system applications. From there, the vendor helped carriers move their systems to Java platforms — with a big focus on wireless — and then on to session initiation protocol servers, Web services and ultimately service delivery platforms (SDPs) as a horizontal service-enabling platform.

Today, BEA is seeing some of its most involved SDP platform deployments at wireless operators. O2, for instance, is running 13,000 third-party apps on a BEA platform, King said. As for the larger SDP vision, where service logic is separated from the network and exposed via open Web services, “I'm not aware of any mobile operator not heading down the road to this type of architecture,” King said. BEA has a half-dozen SDP deployments in full production and another 10 or so in the early stages of rollout, he said.

For operators, SDPs and exposed application programming interfaces answer a key question. “Do I become a full-fledged operator with a full variety of systems, or do I become a pipe provider, focus on voice and allow others to become a provider of those applications? What we're seeing is that most large service providers are not willing to be just pipe providers,” King said, adding: “An awful lot goes into being a phone company that gets ignored when [an upstart] says, ‘Wouldn't it be great to build this new service?’ People are much more tolerant when Web [sites] don't work then when a telecom service fails.”