HONG KONG--Sun Microsystems is courting its service provider customers by promising to work more closely with network equipment vendors to both develop new services more quickly and reduce the cost of doing so.

The company today announced new service provider customers to highlight last week’s announcement of a new global cooperation agreement with Ericsson and Nokia on what the companies call a Telecommunications Platform Initiative. The customer announcements include Telecom New Zealand and Telefonica Moviles de Argentina for Sun’s new Content Delivery Server, a mobile content delivery and management platform that is at the heart of the TPI, as well as Telefonica Moviles Espnana for Sun’s backoffice systems and Chunghwa Telecom for Sun’s multimedia-on-demand servers.

Overall, Sun’s message is one of collaboration and cooperation with network equipment vendors to the benefit of their mutual customers, said Darrell Jordan-Smith, vice president of Global Telco Industry Sales.

“We are focusing on helping our service providers customers on how to deliver new services and also how to reduce their costs--both are important priorities,” Jordan-Smith said. “To do that, you have to work back through the value chain, and that takes you to the big network equipment manufacturers. We are looking to work with them, as we are with Ericsson and Nokia, to create a carrier-grade middleware layer. It can then interface to software systems such as billing, or to new services.”

This new middleware layer actually sits on top of IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture and works in conjunction with IMS, he said. “The TPI initiates hwat needs to be initiated in the network in order to launch a new service.””

This approach enables Sun to capitalize on its long-standing work with application developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) through its Java and open source initiatives to get those folks engaged in developing service provider applications and doing it more quickly, Jordan-Smith said.

“We do the integration for them [network equipment vendors] and it is all open standards-based,” he said. “”They can then deliver integrated solutions to their service provider customer more quickly and at lower cost.”

The time to market of new services can be cut from the typical 18-month cycle to 90 days, he added.

Sun is focused on working with aggressive operators such as Telefonica and in fast-growing markets such as wireless, and in emerging markets, he said. The company also is committed to maintaining open source platforms but investing in those platforms to improve functionality.