Six new member companies have joined the OSGi Alliance -- adding membership gains to the year's technical achievements. The new member companies are Band XI International, Cognos Inc., Compuware Corp., Luminis, Oki Electric Industry Co. and Paremus Ltd.

"This has been a great year for the alliance, posting technical and membership gains, which will stimulate greater adoption of OSGi technology," said Stan Moyer, OSGi Alliance president and an executive director in the applied research area of Telcordia Technologies. "The alliance will continue to build on this momentum in 2007."

OSGi technology is a component integration platform with a service-oriented architecture and lifecycle capabilities that enable dynamic delivery of services. It is universal middleware. These capabilities increase the value of a wide range of computers and devices that use the Java platform.

The alliance published Release 4 of the OSGi Service Platform (R4), added an enterprise expert group, supported member companies' royalty-free patent pledge, and released the R4 mobile specification, which was also accepted into the Java Community Process (JCP) as Java Specification Request 232 (JSR232). Member companies IBM, Nokia, Gatespace Telematics, ProSyst and Samsung pledged the royalty-free patents to OSGi developers, and member companies Nokia and Motorola led the JSR232 submission and approval in the JCP. The OSGi Alliance will continue its work with members of the JCP on new specifications, including JSR 291, which provides dynamic component support for the Java Standard Edition (SE) platform.

The year's new members represent the diverse markets exploring and implementing OSGi technology.

"We've increased our productivity and quality by using the OSGi programming model since the R1 specification was released," said John Cunningham, president of Band XI, a software and systems company. "Our OSGi associate membership assures our customers that we are engaged with the leading edge of new concepts and approaches in the software industry and our use of the technology enables us to delivery quality -- fast -- to our customers."

There are two membership levels in the OSGi Alliance, full member and adopter associate. Full members develop the specifications, work within vertical expert groups and determine the course of the alliance and its technology. The adopter associate member was created this year at a lower membership fee, which gives more companies early access to the universal middleware specifications and even allows them to influence the development and adoption of these specifications.

"We welcome these new innovative companies -- Band XI, Cognos, Compuware, Luminis, Oki Electric and Paremus -- to the alliance and look forward to understanding their experiences and perspectives as we continue to create specifications that address business needs and invite adoption," Moyer said. "The OSGi Alliance plans to host an automotive workshop, an OSGi developer conference in conjunction with EclipseCon and user forum events in 2007 while members continue to work on enhancements to industry accepted OSGi Service Platform specifications."

For OSGi Alliance membership information, visit http://www.osgi.org/join.

For further information on the OSGi Developer Conference at EclipseCon, please visit www.eclipsecon.org/2007.