LIVE FROM APP PLANET FORUM AT THE GSMA MOBILE ASIA CONGRESS 2010: Operators are taking an open approach to app stores, with the intention to enable third-party stores as well as supporting industry alliances such as the Wholesale Applications Community, according to a panel session at today’s opening event. “We don’t think that WAC is the only answer, we believe strongly that we need to create a platform where we also do service enablement of existing ecosystems. So all-in-all, it’s a combination of being members of a club, but also facilitating and enabling others,” said Sissel Henriette Larsen, Head of Content and Apps for Telenor.

Larsen identified cost savings as one of the benefits of WAC, despite the size and economies of scale offered by Telenor – the company is active in 13 markets across Europe and Asia, and has a customer base of more than 185 million. “We do have developer activities in some of our markets, and our history is to be very open to developers. But when we move into apps, the economies of scale that are really required, we have made the choice that our key strategy is to join with WAC. The reason behind that is that it is too costly for us to develop a single ecosystem, even if we do that across Telenor Group.”

Han Kotterman, Chief Strategy Officer of Hong Kong operator CSL, echoed this sentiment, despite the very different dynamics of his company compared to Telenor, and China Mobile, which also presented today.  “On the one hand, we are very keen on exploring opportunities to cooperate with forums like WAC, and we are also very interested in enabling the applications stores that are being developed by others. So we are looking at them both. Most importantly, it is understanding what customers want, and customers want the freedom to go wherever they want. And they sometimes buy their phones on the basis of an ecosystem. We want to make sure that at CSL, we will be able to facilitate that ecosystem.”

Larsen and Kotterman were also of a like mind when discussing the need to protect operator brands when offering mobile apps to consumers, even if this leads to a slower time to market for products. “Coming from a telco perspective we always test things more than once, perhaps too many times, and time to market is really a challenge for us. Everything that we put our brand on is very important to us. We have trusted brands, and we need to fulfil expectations,” noted Larsen. The company is planning to do some “beta” releases to get new products into the hands of selected customers ahead of a full launch  – “that’s quite new for an operator” – although the details of how this will happen were not confirmed.

CSL’s Kotterman said: “Quality is an extremely important part for an operator, particularly when you have customers buying the applications directly from the operator, through an operator bill. We at CSL run an application store, on our own portal, and we have a variety of applications that are thoroughly tested. I wouldn’t say that fast to market is something that we are very good at, but I do believe that we are extremely good at making sure that this customer experience is in line with the expectation that the customer will have from CSL.”