In what is still a crowded IPTV middleware field, Minerva Networks claims to be gaining momentum and is backing up those claims with significant new customer announces and with new capabilities for Minerva’s iTVManager Release 3.2, publicly announced here this week.

“We are building momentum, and we are seeing IPTV gain traction globally,” said Mauro Bonomi, chief executive officer. “We are emerging above the crowd and seeing not only more and more customers, but more ecosystem partners as well.”

The new release for iTVManager offers an application development environment and expands the set-top box ecosystem.

Minerva last week announced 10 new North American IPTV customers and five companies that started with another IPTV vendor and switched to Minerva. “We can claim that we have never been replaced,” Bonomi. “We know that to do that is tough.”

Minerva’s approach to attracting ecosystem partners has been to publish “a well-defined set of APIs for video servers, for conditional access systems and for set-top boxes,” Bonomi said, and let the partners build to those specs. “We are enjoying a tremendous number of new ecosystem partners and other vendors can’t say that.”

Bonomi points specifically to Cisco and Motorola, the two largest set-top box makers in the U.S. market, as ecosystem partners. “They don’t work with anybody, many of the smaller guys cannot play with them,” he said. In addition, Minerva supports ADB, Amino and Entone set-top boxes.

Bonomi believes the industry’s biggest player, Microsoft, will devote the necessary resources to making sure its IPTV middleware succeeds, but insists Minerva is “emerging as a leading open platform,” and points to applications on the NXTcomm show floor from vendors such as Nortel, Integra5 and MetaSwitch working with Minerva’s iTVManager.

“Microsoft sets the bar very high and you have to be able to provide a solution that is comparable to superior to Microsoft and we think we are doing that,” Bonomi said.

The new iTVManager enhances existing personal video recorder capabilities by adding the ability to record a series regardless of what time slot it appears in and two-stream recording functions.

Bonomi acknowledges criticism by some IPTV pioneers of its early software, saying those companies need to deploy new MPEG-4 based set-top boxes and upgraded software.