Committed to building an open applications platform, the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) says it’s signed up 32 new organizations – including wireless operators, vendors and OEMs – to join the initiative. The alliance of telecom companies has also announced the availability of the WAC 1.0 specification following the completion of the WAC and JIL merger at the beginning of the month. WAC 1.0 is based upon JIL 1.2.2.
Industry ecosystem leaders joining WAC at the board level are Accenture, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung. These companies join current board members in setting the strategic direction and evolution of WAC and will be able to launch WAC-enabled storefronts.
“WAC now has 48 members committed to building open platforms, simplifying the application development process for developers and providing their customers with greater choice," said Peters Suh, CEO of WAC. “The influx of new members, combined with our continued delivery against key milestones, demonstrates that the WAC initiative is gaining significant momentum in the market."
Operators joining WAC at the operator member level are América Móvil, Bell Mobility, Bouygues Telecom, China Unicom, Hutchison 3 Group, KDDI, LG Uplus, MTS, Orascom Telecom, Rogers Communications and SFR. Joining as sponsor members are Alcatel-Lucent, Fujitsu, and LG Electronics. WAC operators and sponsors will be able to launch WAC-enabled storefronts and benefit from their substantial commitment to the WAC organization.
New associate members include Aplix, ASPire, Borqs, Capgemini, Innoace, LiMo Foundation, Myriad Group, Oberthur Technologies, Obigo, Opera Software, Oracle and ZTE. All members have the opportunity to get involved in the working groups of the organization and have access to WAC documents, specifications and code.
In addition, WAC announced the completion of the purchase of the JIL assets on Oct. 1. The completion of the acquisition is the final stage of the process to combine JIL with WAC, and enables WAC to provide the WAC 1.0 specification to the developer community.
“The availability of the WAC 1.0 specification sends out a strong message to the developer community that we are committed to working with them to create cross-platform applications that will benefit the entire mobile communications ecosystem" continued Suh.
The group previously announced that it wants to go live in February 2011 with its platform that will let apps address every user out there, regardless of device or access technology. Time will tell if it’s able to take a bit out of iTunes' hegemony.
