Mobile network companies, wireless handset makers and IT companies
announced the formation of a new industry body, the Open Mobile
Alliance, yesterday (12 June).
The Open Mobile Alliance will drive the adoption of standards for
mobile telecommunication services and guarantee interoperability
between mobile products and services, according to Jon Prial,
vice-president of business development at IBM.
"The intent is to grow the market so all of the members can compete
within that," Prial said.
The Open Mobile Alliance brings together more than 200 companies
and consolidates the activities of several industry bodies, such as
the WAP Forum and the Wireless Village initiative, according to
Prial.
Mobile industry experts such as Tim Scannell, a research director
with Shoreline Research, said the arrival of the Open Mobile
Alliance is more than timely.
"There is a strong effort in the industry right now to come up with
some sort of standardisation - especially in wireless, for
carrier-grade reliability - because a lot of these wireless systems
out there are not so reliable when they start transferring data as
well as voice over these systems. So this is an effort to improve
the reliability, improve the capabilities in these systems, and
inject some degree of standardisation out there," Scannell
said.
Among the issues that will be tackled by the Open Mobile Alliance
are the development of standards such as XHTML, Multimedia Message
Service (MMS) interoperability, and standards for location-based
services, Prial said. Future initiatives will focus on developing
digital rights management and device management standards, he
said.
Full interoperability between wireless products and networks should
foster a diverse eco-system that benefits both users and vendors
alike, Prial said.
"Network operators can invest with confidence that the mobile
service are based on an open, interoperable set of standards with
less risk of solutions being limited by proprietary alternatives.
They will also be able to greatly expand their choices of
technology providers," Prial said. "The benefits of the Open Mobile
Alliance for both the consumers and the business users will be an
extensive amount of mobile services that are interoperable across
regions, devices and operator networks."
Members of the new group are drawn from across the technology
industry and include Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson Telephone, Siemens,
Sun Microsystems, OpenWave Systems, Microsoft, Oracle,
Hewlett-Packard, BEA Systems, Vodafone Group, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and
MasterCard International, Prial said.
Getting such a wide range of companies - many of which are
competitors - to work together toward mobile platform
interoperability may not be as difficult as it first may seem,
Scannell said. Vendors may conform to mobile interoperability
standards, but they will still battle to differentiate themselves
in the market with unique features and applications.
"The challenge is for vendors to differentiate their products. The
Open Mobile Alliance is more or less a framework to build upon,"
Scannell said. "It's similar to the same effort that happened for
the Internet, or the same effort that happened with the design of
PCs, there is a certain level of standardisation, and then you go
beyond that to differentiate your product and that's where you'll
capture market share."
Representatives for the Open Mobile Alliance gave no specific
timeline for the arrival of mobile interoperability
standards.
"There is a lot of settling down to do before we get to a point
where everything is standardised, so it's still pretty much an open
field. But this is a good step in the right direction," Scannell
said.