The term “long tail” is not your typical networking lingo fad like “paradigm shift” or “customer centricity,” but it could be, if abused. It is an actual phenomenon coined and described by Wired magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson, who is not your typical technology magazine editor—to describe the cumulative business effect of small niche products. So, when vendors jump on this term, as they have on so many others, they can be forgiven—as long as the long tail actually relates to what they are trying to do.

Belfast-based Aepona can be forgiven. Many of those from a group of engineers who formed Aldiscon in 1999 and sold it to Logica in 1997 are back together again at Aepona. And Aepona says it has a new service delivery architecture for the long tail. If so, service providers are going to need it because they have been saying for years they are building architectures that can put up or take down hundreds of services and applications at the click of a mouse. They have also been saying their revenue will come not from a ubiquitous service, such as voice or Internet access, but from the plethora of easily configurable niche services that address each customer’s unique needs. Those are long-tail services.

We know who will be creating those services; it won’t be the service provider. But to deliver them, providers are increasingly turning to service-oriented architectures and Web 2.0, the term used to describe the transition from the World Wide Web to a full-fledged Internet computing platform serving Web applications to end users.

“There’s a shift in the market away from tightly coupled interfaces and toward a Web services approach, particularly in a Web 2.0 model,” said Michael Crossey, vice president of marketing for Aepona.

Like Amazon.com—which makes the most of low inventory, low cost distribution for thousands of products—Aepona said service providers can do the same with specialized IPTV content.

Crossey said service delivery platforms will have to change dramatically to serve this new model. “Network operators are still network operators and are paranoid about their assets. They need a platform that really protects their network core assets so that when they publish Web services, they can be sure it’s done right.”

New service delivery platforms (SDPs) such as Aepona’s will address security, policy, service level management and billing issues related to third-party content provider management. The Web services SDP allows operators to compose the services offered by third parties while implementing the necessary access control and business logic for each of them.

In a white paper published by Aepona, the company said the recent emergence of content aggregators is not necessarily the best solution. Besides not solving the problem of managing multiple third-partner relationships, “Having another player in the value chain clearly reduces potential revenues to both the telecom operator and the content provider,” the paper said.

At his company’s partner summit earlier this month, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco CEO, extolled the virtues of Web 2.0 and said it was the technology for enabling collaboration. “Web 2.0 gives us all an opportunity to achieve things that before we only dreamed about," he said.

Canadian provider Telus recently named Aepona the prime supplier for its service delivery framework project, which is a major initiative by the company to use Web services to expose the capabilities of its network to third-party application developers and enterprise customers.

“Being a small company serving large carriers, you need a tight project development process and we have one,” Crossey said.

Aepona will use the $10 million it raised in February from investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Polaris Ventures and Trinity Venture Capital to expand its sales presence in key markets such as China, India and North America, and to fund its network gateway product line.