Following up on a strategic partnership with HP around an open IP multimedia subsystem approach, Tekelec and BEA announced this week at NXTcomm that the two have completed interoperability testing and BEA will join the partnership.

The companies will be demonstrating their IMS environment in the BEA booth with four applications from Ericpol, Imstream, Intervoice and Telenity.

“We have worked with Tekelec on many deployments over several years especially with BEA’s [operations support systems] and [business support system] solutions. This is another great opportunity,” said Chris King, senior director of worldwide telecommunications markets for BEA.

The companies in the Open IMS alliance are working with the Advanced TCA standard to advance the idea of open-standards-based solutions. King said the industry is still getting a lot of positive feedback from operators on ATCA. “They like the power benefits, the interoperability of products and obviously the price point,” he said.

Separately, BEA announced that OSS Observer named it the market leader for middleware with a 36% market share. That’s a 29% increase form last year in a market OSS Observer said will grow from $836 million last year to $1.8 billion in 2011, a compound annual growth rate of 16%.

The company also announced two new customers for its service delivery platform and a new release of BEA Weblogic Network Gatekeeper, which will be demonstrated at NXTcomm, with enhance telecom Web services and policy management. It now fully integrates IMS, session initiation protocol (SIP), Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) with Telecom Web Services, Enterprise Web Services and policy/partner enforcement. The new release also includes a service creation environment with a software developer kit and extension toolkit, both of which support integration with Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environments (IDE.)