June 12, 2002
(IDG News Service)
Network operators, handset makers and IT companies are lining up to back a new industry group that has been formed to drive the development of standards for mobile telecommunication services and guarantee interoperability between mobile products and services.
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 Jon Prial, vice president of business development at IBM and a member of the Open Mobile Alliance board of directors.
"The intent is to grow the market so all of the members can compete within that," Prial said.
Among the issues the Open Mobile Alliance plans to tackle are the development of standards such as Extensible HTML, Multimedia Message Service interoperability and standards for location-based services, Prial said. Future initiatives will focus on developing digital rights management and device management standards, he said.
Analyst Bill Lesieur, of Technology Business Research in Hampton, N.H., called the OMA a "naturual evolution of a very fragmented market that developed as competitors across networking, computing and software industries vied for leadership positions in the emerging moble Internet market."
And even though Nokia Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are part of the group, he predicted that the two "will continue to battle it out to be top dog in mobile Internet devices, software and services." In fact, Lesieur views the OMA as a way for equipment makers and carriers to "temper" the influence of Nokia and Microsoft. PCs are independent devices from the Internet, unlike mobile phones, he said.
"We are not at a point in which any mobile user can use any mobile phone and any mobile application on any mobile network worldwide and expect it to work," Lesieur said.
The members of the group include most of the major and many of the smaller carriers. While founders of OMA include backers of Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications, there are also Code Division Multiple Access carriers from the U.S., including Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS.
Other members, drawn from across the technology industry, include Motorola Inc., LM Ericsson Telephone Co., Siemens AG, Sun Microsystems Inc., OpenWave Systems Inc., Oracle Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., BEA Systems Inc., Vodafone Group PLC, NTT DoCoMo Inc., KDDI Corp. and MasterCard International Inc., Prial said.
Computerworld's Matt Hamblen contributed to this report.