Aepona today announced that SAP Ventures, a division of SAP AG, has finalized a strategic investment in the company. SAP Ventures’ investment represents the completion of the $10 million funding round announced by Aepona on May 6, 2010.
Aepona’s Universal Service Platform (USP) provides application developers access to mobile network capabilities, such as voice communications, location services, messaging and billing, making it easy to enrich enterprise applications with new mobility features. This, in turn, allows businesses to implement communications-enabled business processes that increase efficiency, enhance customer service and improve competitiveness. For mobile network operators,
Aepona’s USP provides the foundation for an end-to-end wholesale applications ecosystem and enabling new business models based on the mobile cloud computing paradigm.
The investment by SAP Ventures is said to be in line with its strategy to help build industry-leading technology companies that complement the range of enterprise application and solutions that SAP brings to market.
“Enabling application developers to easily utilize telecommunication network assets has been an industry endeavor for many years, both for telecommunication operators as well as for application developers,” said Jörg Sievert, partner at SAP Ventures.
“Aepona’s solution, which is based on a decade of technology developments, has the potential of solving a core part of this challenge to the benefit of operators and application developers alike. The main beneficiary, though, will be the customer, who eventually will have access to telco-enabled applications in an unprecedented manner. We believe that Aepona stands to be a core part of this evolving ecosystem of telecommunications companies, ISVs and customers. We look forward to working with Aepona, and to help the company deliver on this goal for the industry.”
“We are delighted to welcome SAP Ventures as an investor in Aepona,” said Al Snyder, CEO, Aepona. “Having such a prestigious brand as SAP associated with the company is a major confirmation of our strategy and market position, and we are excited about the synergies that this relationship will enable with SAP enterprise applications. We strongly believe that mobile-enabled business services will be a key driver for value creation across the mobile ecosystem. Together with last month’s investment by BlackBerry Partners Fund, Aepona is now poised to forge a leading position in the mobile ecosystem, with strong financial backing and partnership opportunities with two of the leading players in the mobile enterprise domain.”