BERLIN — (Marketwire) — 09/21/11 — The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), an international specifications setting body, announces availability of API specifications for more than 40 network and device resources, with various language and protocol bindings. These new standards allow the creation of interfaces to the service infrastructure residing within existing networks and on devices. By deploying these programmable connections, service providers can increase their developer base, reduce time-to-market for new applications and services, and simplify wider deployment of existing applications and services.
“As the applications market has exploded with hundreds of choices of APIs that offer the same functionality, OMA has answered industry demand for standardized access to fundamental resources,” says Musa Unmehopa, Chair of OMA-s Technical Plenary. “By deploying OMA API specifications, operators can now expose their specific assets for the common functions required by every developer of mobile applications — no matter what signaling protocols, platforms or other APIs they use.”
Additional operating systems, development platforms and network capabilities have now become established in the market. This has added new market channels for existing global customers. At the same time, the ever-expanding number of APIs has fragmented the application development and service delivery markets.
“Estimates for the market potential of applications and services are in the range of tens of billions of dollars in the next four to five years,” says Fred Harrison, Chairman of the Board of OMA. “Without standardization to support wide scale market growth, developers may find difficulty in working with a range of service providers, whilst customers and service providers may be limited in their access to the broad developer community.”
“When combined with the wide and growing number of service delivery platforms, OMA APIs will enrich telecom services across networks globally,” says Liliana Dinale, Chair of the OMA Architecture Working Group. “The wide variety of OMA APIs offer modularized control to service providers in order to facilitate application development in an efficient way. The scope of OMA-s API work enables traditional connection scenarios among applications and services. This directly supports the emerging class of Web 2.0 and mass market developers — who are extending network services to web-widgets and mash ups on both the client and server sides.”
OMA is pleased with the growing support of its API Program from a wide spectrum of industry players. The list includes operators, equipment manufacturers, and software vendors from across the globe.
The following companies endorse OMA-s work in specifying APIs to enable operators and other service providers to expose existing network capabilities to as wide a variety of developers as possible. As the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry deploys the next round of advanced services, many of these services require access to core network capabilities, common across all operators globally. We state our endorsement of OMA-s standardized approach to offer access to core network capabilities. The OMA API program creates global API standards that expose these crucial capabilities in an open and programmable way.
The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) delivers open specifications for creating interoperable services that work across all geographical boundaries, on any bearer network. To date, OMA has published more than 100 enabler releases with ongoing maintenance, revisions and new versions of its work. OMA-s specifications support the billions of new and existing fixed and mobile terminals across a variety of mobile networks. Driven by the global demand for mobile data services, the member companies of the Open Mobile Alliance support the adoption of new and enhanced information, communication and entertainment solutions. The Open Mobile Alliance includes contributors from all key elements of the wireless value chain, and contributes to the timely and efficient introduction of services and applications to the market.
The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) name and logo are trademarks of Open Mobile Alliance Ltd. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks or trade names of their respective owners.
Bobby Fraher
OMA Communications
+1.415.531.2680
You must be logged in to post a comment Login