Huawei today announced the launch of the first global commercial WAC enabled app store and mobile phone with the Philippines carrier, Smart Communications. The solution is fully compliant with the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC)’s 1.0 specifications – an alliance of telecommunications companies committed to building an open applications platform, which is said to provide carriers with a unified service platform that aggregates mobile internet applications, enables more revenue generation and ultimately delivers a better cloud-based service experience to end users.
WAC is an application delivery center with applications submitted by global developers. The platform provides opportunities for global developers to create, synchronize and sell applications using standard and open Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs). It also helps carriers maintain sustainable competitive advantages through transforming themselves from a walled-garden approach to applications development to one that fosters innovation and ease of execution based on a global mobile ecosystem paradigm.
“Huawei is fully supportive of WAC and its vision and is committed to continue to develop and deliver the right applications development platform in alignment with WAC specifications for our member carriers and applications developers,” said Dr. Haiping Che, CTO and Vice President of Huawei Software. “We were honored that SMART has chosen us to be their strategic partner for the rollout of its applications store this year, which represents the first commercial use of the platform.”
The practice of carrier members linking to the application value chain only at the beginning and at the terminus is now a thing of the past. Our industry leading end-to-end solution of WAC revolutionized the entire experience, bringing about a paradigmatic shift in positioning carrier members as a link anywhere in the applications value chain by enabling app store, settlement platform, gateway and mobile devices such as Android. Under this paradigm, global developers can now access a common set of network APIs across all carriers’ networks, including powerful network functions such as location-based service, messaging services (SMS/MMS) and in-application billing to enhance stickiness and other features of the applications. This will be a boon to application development lifecycle, modularity, engineering efforts and reusability of modules.
Carriers can also look to and leverage the capabilities that a WAC enabled settlement platform delivers to fulfill their needs for full partner lifecycle management, ranging partner registration, to settlement, payment and reporting. These modular functionalities, coupled with the built-in product and customer intelligence, are working together seamlessly to foster an applications development environment that enables the developers to focus on creating innovative and compelling end-user applications, and for the operators to shorten time-to-market and remain competitive in their respective countries.