Originally posted on 17Jul12 to IBM Developerworks (9,830 Views)
“Apigee, the API management company that was most recently spotted powering that new “print to Walgreens” feature in half a dozen or so mobile applications, is now acquiring the technology assets of WAC, aka the Wholesale Applications Community. WAC, an alliance of global telecom companies, like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Deutsche Telecom, China Mobile, Orange, and others (and pegged by TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid back in 2010 as “a disaster in the making“) was intent on building a platform that would allow mobile developers to build an application once, then run it on any carrier, OS or device. The group also developed network API technology, which is another key piece to today’s acquisition.”
TechCrunch – techcrunch.com/2012/07/17/wac-whacked-telecom-backed-alliance-merges-into-gsma-assets-acquired-by-api-management-service-apigee/
I think this is a really interesting development. The Wholesale Application Community (WAC) was supposed to give Telcos a way of minimizing the revenue losses to the likes of Apple’s App Store and Google Play. IBM’s Telecom Solution Lab in France built a demonstration that was shown at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in 2011 demonstration how a Telco’s own app store could incorporate applications from the WAC App store as well as other app stores within their own combined app store. I’ve demonstrated this a number of times around the world and the thing that always seemed odd to me is that applications in the WAC App Store could not be native applications (for Android, Blackberry, WinMob or Symbian) but rather, they could ONLY be HTML5 based apps. That was always going to limit the number of apps that would be in the WAC App store, but since the WAC was announced at WMC 2010, the number of apps in the store has never really taken off.
I’m not sure if this is effectively the end of the road for the WAC, or if it’s just a stop on their journey. Certainly, the Telcos that I have dealt with that form the core WAC Telco members remain dedicated to the WAC. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
