By Monica Alleven
STOCKHOLM—Ericsson is making no secret about its desire to be there for operators when they need a broker for application stores and mobile advertising.
That’s one of the messages executives are relaying as part of the Ericsson Business Innovation Forum, a two-day event highlighting innovation in telecom. Besides executives from Ericsson, the event includes presentations from the likes of Intel, CNN International, GSMA, Telenor Sweden and others.
Being able to take its expertise to the carriers and set up brokering services is one of Ericsson’s missions, according to Jan Uddenfeldt, senior vice president and senior advisor of technology to the CEO. Uddenfeldt is based at Ericsson’s Silicon Valley division in San Jose, Calif., where it employs about 1,100.
Today, Ericsson supplies brokering in the areas of messaging, charging and a number of areas, but so far, it is not offering the types of brokering services to U.S. operators that it would like to in the areas of application stores and advertising. U.S. operators typically are slower to cooperate with one another in areas like interoperability. To wit: It took a long time for SMS interoperability to be put in place and spark a texting revolution.
Going forward, it’s important for operators to have their own application stores, Uddenfeldt said. But what’s needed are open APIs and a common interface between multiple operators in the same country that will accommodate a multitude of devices – rather than the singular app stores that so far are devoted to one platform or another. That process of getting operators to agree on a common interface, however, is most likely to occur over a number of years.
In his presentation, John Woodget, global director of the telecom sector for Intel, related the story of sailor Tony Bullimore and how he survived in the ocean under his upside-down boat for days before being rescued. Then Woodget described how a wall of water, or tsunami, potentially could come rushing toward the industry if it doesn’t prepare for the onslaught of data-centric devices and networks capable of supporting them. Both Ericsson and Intel cited projections for dramatic growth in the mobile Internet – like 50 billion connected devices in the future.
Uddenfeldt said Ericsson is ready for the challenge. Over the next 10 years, estimates call for mobile Internet usage to double each year. “We can handle it,” he said.