Bridgewater Systems (TSX: BWC), the Ottawa, Canada headquartered mobile personalization company, inaugurated a new Center of Excellence in collaboration with Wesley Clover in Gurgaon, Delhi NCR. This is Bridgewater’s first global R&D center outside Canada.

Bridgewater Systems enables service providers to personalize, manage, and deliver applications such as mobile commerce, mobile video, and social networking to over 150 million subscribers globally. The Company’s mobile personalization portfolio provides a real-time, unified view of the subscriber including service entitlements, devices and networks being used, billing profiles, and preferences based on location or time of the day. This allows service providers to launch and monetize new services faster by personalizing the subscriber’s mobile experience and adopting new service models.

According to Mr. Ed Ogonek, President and CEO of Bridgewater Systems, “Bridgewater's new center of excellence in India is a key part of our strategy to expand globally. India's rapidly growing mobile data market and advanced R&D skills are central to our success. The center of excellence will provide technology development for our global product portfolio and offer sales, professional and support services for our customers and partners across the Asia Pacific region."

Building on Bridgewater’s presence in the region, the center will complement a new office in Hong Kong, and the company’s office in Australia. India’s rapidly growing mobile data market and advanced R&D capabilities are instrumental to the Center’s success. It will serve customers such as Tata Teleservices in India, Tesltra and Hutchison in Australia, SmarTone-Vodafone in Hong Kong, and Global Mobile and Tatung in Taiwan.

The Center of Excellence will serve as the cornerstone for the Asia Pacific region in three key areas – mobile data technology development for Bridgestone’s intelligent control products, sales and customer support, and professional services.

India is one of the top two mobile markets in the world with over half a billion mobile subscribers. The recent 3G and 4G auctions will enable operators to deliver advanced mobile data services to subscribers and meet the government target of achieving 100 million broadband subscribers by 2014 from the February 2010 level of 8.6 million users.

Industry-leading expertise and advanced skills-set that Bridgestone can bring to India’s telecommunications industry include areas of 3G auction, migration to next-generation networks and platforms including WiMAX and LTE, and helping operators and service providers cope and profit from the explosion in mobile data growth.

The network costs associated with delivering mobile data and internet services could be greater than revenues by 2012 unless operators adopt network cost reduction strategies including policy control, data offload, migration to 3G and 4G. Bridgewater helps operators in India and globally deploys these strategies to reduce the cost of managing data traffic.

The opening ceremony was officiated by Ed Ogonek, Bridgewater President and CEO, Parminder Singh, Head of India Business Development, Raj Narula, Director at Wesley Clover, and Mr Mario Ste-Marie, Minister (Commercial) and Program Manager (India), Canadian High Commission at Le Meridien Windsor Place hotel in New Delhi. The new office is located at Udyog Vihar Phase II, Gurgaon, Haryana.