WAC not a return to the walled garden

Officials from the newly minted Wholesale Applications Community and the GSM Association this week made their first public comments since Mobile World Congress about the strategy and aims of the global operator consortium. While they were short on specifics about the platform and business model of WAC, they gave a fairly detailed account of what WAC will be and what it will not be.

First of all, what it will not be: According to WAC interim CEO Tim Raby, the consortium will not be a vehicle for operators to wrest back the app store from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and re-establish the old-world order of the walled garden and carrier-branded content. Rather, WAC seeks to achieve an open development platform, common to all devices, that allows developer to access a common set of network application programming interfaces (APIs) that work across all operators’ networks. The result will be a development environment built on already existing Web tools, where an app can be built once and work across billions of devices on hundreds of networks globally, Raby said.

“This is not about operators creating new services necessarily,” Raby said. “This is about operators creating an environment for developers to create new services and applications.”

Make no mistake, Raby said, the carrier wants to reinsert itself into the value chain, but unlike in the past, the operator wants to be a link in that chain rather the beginning and terminus. In addition, WAC feels operators have plenty to offer in exchange for their inclusion. The evolution of the vertically integrated platforms such as Android and Apple’s iPhone OS has driven the mobile data boom and engendered the primacy of the mobile app and smartphone. But it also had some big side effects, Raby said. Operators have been largely left out of the equation, even though their costly network investments provide the fundamental connectivity necessary to make these platforms run.

Not only are operators usually left out of the revenue share in app store transactions, but the functionality they’ve built into their networks has gone largely untouched, as developers and platform providers use 3G primarily as a bit pipe to Internet-based services, Raby said. SMS, MMS, user location, social location and presence, personalization, identity verification, universal profile information, direct billing and data connection management are all powerful network functions developers could access if they were willing to bring operators back into the fold, Raby said.

While the decoupling of operator from the app and the revenue stream may seem like some plot by greedy Internet companies looking to shut out the operator, Raby admited operators are just as culpable for the current state of the industry. A developer looking to launch an app in a market has to deal with three operators with three sets of network APIs with three different monetization schemes for those APIs. If a developer wants to expand into multiple markets, the problem is compounded ad infinitum. Over-the-top services were probably never really the goal of developers and platform providers, Raby said: “Over-the-top is a side effect.”

Rather than struggle with the proposition of building an app for hundreds of different networks, developers naturally gravitated toward third-party device platforms and app stores. By introducing a common set of network APIs, operators can make themselves valuable to developers once again, Raby said. “We have to create the kind of environment that provides something developers don’t have,” he said.

That brings us to the second thing WAC won’t be: It will not further fragment the handset market, Raby said. Rather, WAC’s goal is the opposite, he added. It aims to create a universal development environment that bridges that various vertically integrated platforms in the market. WAC won’t create a new operating system, middleware or handset client that it will then foist upon handset vendors and customers.