Today, the GSMA hosted the Wholesale Application Community’s big announcement of its commercial launch – about a year to the day after the operators first outlined their plans to do so.
So what was announced? Well, Michel Combes, Chairman of WAC (and Vodafone’s CEO, Europe), said that WAC now had eight operators “connected” to WAC – those operators being China Mobile, MTS, Orange, Smart, Telefónica, Telenor, Verizon and Vodafone.“We are looking to add at least another eight operators to the platform this year,” he said.
There was also a commitment from Samsung and LG, who said that all handsets they produce from now on that are capable of running the WAC runtime, would do so.
Finally Suh announced that WAC 2.0 specification was now available, and that WAC 3.0 would be available from September this year. It is this release which will include goodies such as html5 support, in-app billing and network APIs, giving WAC its “differentiator” as a development platform, Suh said. Suh showed an app developed with Fox TV for TV programme Glee that allowed things such as social network mash-ups and in-app billing.
WAC has also enlisted the help of Ericsson to provide a white label app store to operators – with the first operator taking the store to be Telenor. Not all operators, of course, will fancy using a white label store offering.
Indeed,the front end affords the main chance for operators connected to WAC to differentiate, given that they will all have access to the same apps.
Although this was a “commercial” launch, there were no hard new WAC app store launches as such, although Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone are all providing WAC-enabled applications through their stores.
Combes said that WAC has been formed to provide interoperability between platforms and devices, so that consumers can access applications from a variety of devices, and gain a common experience.
“We saw a major threat with the emergence of community-centric systems that don’t interoperate,” he said. “In our industry customers fought for number portability, and we were more than happy to allow that because that gave them freedom of choice. And now we believe that what is needed is ecosystem portability for the customer to say “why should I care about what type of device I have to place a video call, or download an app, or to be able to do whatever with whatever device I have in hand. This is a new era of co-operation for all actors in the industry.”
Of course, many have seen the apps threat to operators as being more about revenue-risk, and network demand. WAC, to many, is the operators’ play in apps – a way of providing a development environment that potentially has billions of users.
Yet AT&T said that operators were actually trying to provide more choice to consumers.
“We want to maximise customer choice” its representative said at the launch, “and if you are a customer that loves Apple we want to make sure you have access to that, but we see almost half our customers accessing the same content on 3 devices and to a customer you want to be agnostic. WAC facilitates that – it improves customer choice and accelerates the velocity of the innovation cycle.”
Telefonica COO Julio Linares said that the launch was evidence that telcos could move at high speed and accomplish something like WAC, despite what he termed “doubters”.
Orange’s spokesperson said, “We think this is the only way to solve ecosystem operability, and the best way to create compelling value creation for developers and Orange customers.”