OneAPI testing environment goes live with Aepona
Ever since the 1980s, parts of the telecoms industry have struggled to open up the switching infrastructure to third parties as a way of speeding innovation and creativity. All too often, those plans have crumbled in the face of technical challenges and opposition from both equipment vendors and operators keen to preserve the status quo.
With traditional mobile business models now under attack from a variety of directions, a number of service providers in recent years have introduced partnership programs with the application developer community – but with varying degrees of success. With a protectionist ‘walled garden' mentality seemingly an inherent part of much of the mobile establishment, it's only very recently that the explosive success of truly open platforms like the i-Phone has forced service providers to confront their destiny – hence the recent introduction of the GSMA's OneAPI programme.
While developer programmes have gone some way down the track to opening up network functions and assets such as location and charging- taking the internet's Web 2.0 vision to spawn the Telco 2.0 web-based services concept – those developers have had to confront great variations in different technologies and standards across those different networks.
To resolve these problems, the GSMA has partnered with open applications specialist Aepona to create a platform where developers can experiment with new functions and processes to rapidly create new applications. Currently, five mobile service providers are interconnected to the network – Telenor, Vodafone, Orange, Telecom Italia and Telus – with a number of others already expressing strong interest. The current infrastructure exposes messaging and location assets and its planned to soon add user and data connection profiles and charging functions to the set.
"If the last few years have shown anything, it's that the application developer community that really knows the end-user market," says Michael Crossey, VP marketing at Aepona (pictured above). "Aepona's been plugging away at realising this vision for a number of years now we're proud that the GSMA chose us as the proxy platform for this initiative. Which much good work had been done before by service providers and vendors, ultimately it was fragmented. These days, both project budgets and timescales need to be tightened and we've seen major interest from the whole community at the show in this approach."
More at: http://oneapi.aepona.com/