Mobile Groups Join Forces

Several industry groups, looking to consolidate the efforts in creating a
single source for mobile Web service applications, announced their
intention Wednesday to form a single entity — the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).

OMA is an extension of the open mobile architecture initiative supported by
many in the mobile industry today, pooling resources from groups like the
SynchML Initiative and the Location Interoperability Forum (LIF) to create
universal mobile application programming interfaces (APIs) on the Java
framework.

The worldwide group of more than 200 vendors, software developers, content
companies and telecoms is expected to bring together disparate works in
mobile messaging, through interoperability testing labs and standards
approved by approving bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force and
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to create a single mobile specification.

Patti Korhonen, Nokia senior vice president of mobile software, said the
alliance is designed to bring the fragmented world of mobile communications
under one roof.

“The Open Mobile Architecture initiative, launched last November,
demonstrated unprecedented momentum in bringing together mobile industry
leaders and defining the starting points for a uniform mobile services
platform,” she said. “We are now excited about consolidating these efforts
to form the Open Mobile Alliance and to carry on important industry-wide
specification work.”

Rival companies in the mobile services industry have been working together
for more than a year, on other projects, to bring wireless ubiquity to
mobile services — whether they run on a PDA or over a digital phone.

The Wireless Village announced in February the interoperability
of mobile instant messaging on the Ericsson , Motorola
and Nokia platforms.

The significance of the announcement shouldn’t be overlooked — in the PC
world, this would be very like Windows, Linux and Sun developers coming out
and saying they were working together on a common solution.

According to Mark Winther, research firm IDC group vice president for
worldwide telecommunications, the OMA is a good step forward for the mobile
industry.

“The Open Mobile Alliance reflects a very welcome new attitude in the
mobile industry,” he said. “An individual technology, product, vendor or
operator will have little success without engaging all aspects of the
mobile value chain — devices, networks, applications, and content.”

OMA brings together some of the biggest names in the Internet industry,
including: America Online , AT&T Wireless , Bell Canada , Compaq Computer Corp. , Deutsche Telekom Mobilnet , Documentum, Inc.
, IBM , Disney and
Mastercard International, Inc.

OMA officials expect to release consolidated standards in the near future
as soon as they are finalized.