Openwave announced yesterday a new location infrastructure offering dedicated to wireless operators in emerging markets. Openwave Location Express,is presented as “an easy-to-deploy,location-based infrastructure appliance,that enables rapid entry into the location-based services market.” It supports both basic (Cell/Sector-ID) and advanced (A-GPS) location-based services and is compatible with GSM/UMTS mobile phone and network standards.

“Openwave is a world leader in location infrastructure and is processing more than 100 million transactions per month”,said Dan Nguyen,interim vice president,products and marketing at Openwave. “We believe Location Express will be an excellent entry vehicle for smaller operators in growing markets.”

Location Express can support up to 5 transactions per second and provides operators with an upgrade path to Openwave Location Manager Commercial Edition for increased capacity and redundancy. The solution is expected to be available globally in July 2009.

According to a 2008 report from ABI Research,Openwave has six percent market share worldwide for the location infrastructure business.