VanillaPlus

Cambridge, UK. 8 September, 2010 – OpenCloud Ltd, a supplier of real-time application server software for next-generation convergent telecommunications services, has today announced that it has received an investment of £4 million from Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), one of the largest telecoms hardware, software and services companies in the world plus an additional £1 million from its existing venture capital (VC) investors Advent Venture Partners and No 8 Ventures.

In addition to the investment by NSN OpenCloud has secured an OEM agreement that will see OpenCloud’s Rhino Telecom Application Server and Service Interaction Server becoming integrated into NSN’s charge@once unified product suite. This is a modular, scalable and flexible convergent charging system.

For the last two years, OpenCloud and NSN have enjoyed an increasingly successful working partnership, securing 13 joint customers in that time. As a spokesman told VanillaPlus, this represents roughly 30% of all OpenCloud's orders in that period.

The £5m (€6.1m) investment will be used by OpenCloud to further its expansion across the globe. It will also allow OpenCloud to extend its partner and application portfolios, as well as to assist in the development of future products. This announcement comes at a time when the market demand for OpenCloud’s Telecoms Application Server and Service Broker products is increasing.

In the last year, OpenCloud’s growth has exceeded the company's projections.  Revenues have tripled year-on-year and the company has seen 13 customer wins in the last year alone. OpenCloud’s client roster now includes some of the telecom industry’s biggest players, such as BT, Vodafone, and T-Mobile among its current customer base of over 30 mobile and fixed network telecom operators.

“We are continuing with our quest to open up the telecoms service layer, to provide compelling technology to the expanding community of telecoms software developers and deliver better value and increased innovation,” says Jeff Gordon, CEO of OpenCloud. “Naturally, we are delighted to be making this announcement. In particular receiving an investment from NSN is a strong endorsement of OpenCloud’s products and strategy, and it will help to support our continuing rapid growth. This move elevates our relationship with NSN to that of a truly strategic partner and will enable us to address the considerable service layer and converged charging opportunities in the market.”

“This investment will allow NSN to address the considerable converged charging and service delivery platform opportunities in the market”, says Rick Centeno, Head of Charging, Billing and Care, Nokia Siemens Networks. “We will be able to better provide our customers with an integrated offering to fit their end-to-end needs around service development, delivery, control and charging”.

OpenCloud's Rhino product is a real-time application server for agile development, deployment and efficient management of person-to-person communication services. Rhino is a carrier-grade service execution environment for traditional and Telco 2.0 services on TDM and IP-based networks. It uses commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software to deliver service layer agility to networks at a radically lower price point than traditional systems from network equipment providers.

OpenCloud is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with Research & Development, Engineering and Support in New Zealand and Spain, as well as branch offices in Singapore and Jakarta, Indonesia.