Ericpol Telecom, based in Poland, is one of Ericsson’s partners in the IMS segment. It started its business in 1991 as a services company. It has offices in Poland, Sweden, Ukraine and Mexico, and about 800 employees worldwide working in the telecommunications segment.

Walter Zielinski, CTO at Ericpol, says that in 2004, the company also entered the product-market area, starting with IN products. And about two years ago, it added IMS-based products and services to its portfolio.

“We chose to go for IMS because it is an integral part of the network transformation and we need to be there to be part of the telecommunications future,” Zielinski says.

Ericpol now has an IMS-compliant portfolio of about 10 products. Central to these, Zielinski says, are a real-time streaming and video-blog service, allowing the consumer to generate and uploaded their own content to community sites, such as YouTube. Other key services include a custom rate service, black and white list, and a collect calls service.

“All our IMS products support IN connectivity as an option because the number of IMS subscribers in most networks is still not enough to provide a viable business case for the operator,” Zielinski says.

Ericpol’s IMS business has not grown as quickly as he would have liked, Zielinski says. “The growth of IMS reminds us of that of UMTS,” he says. “It took longer than many expected before it was widely deployed. However, IMS is slowly becoming a mainstream architecture and we are committed to staying in this segment and eventually making it into a profitable business.”

Ericpol has worked with Ericsson since 1991 and the two companies signed their first Corporate Frame Agreement in 1997. “There are many reasons why we chose to go with Ericsson,” Zielinski says. “Firstly, it is a much-respected company. Secondly, Ericsson gives us a very good channel to the market and makes customers trust us in a way they wouldn’t if we went alone. And finally, compared with many other companies in the business, Ericsson has a very accomplished sales staff, which also helps us become successful.”

Rolf Carlsson, head of operations for the Ericsson Developer Program and 3PP Application Portfolio manager for Ericpol at Ericsson, says: “Ericpol is a long-term strategic partner to Ericsson. We see potential in Ericpol’s IMS-enabled applications and jointly we can bring innovative ideas to our IMS customers.”

Zielinski is pleased with the support given by Ericsson, and says they have had valuable access to Ericsson laboratories, know-how and customers.

“I encourage the developer community to use Ericsson’s tools and integrate them with other tools available in the market, be it open source or commercial tools from other companies,” Zielinski says. “And if a company seeks closer cooperation with Ericsson, they should know that it’s easier to integrate their processes with those of Ericsson, than the other way around.”

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By Benny Ritzén