The CEOs of Asia operator giants Axiata and Globe welcomed progress of the GSMA Open Gateway initiative but urged the industry to go even further on cross-operator collaboration.
Reacting to a question from GSMA director general Mats Granryd (pictured, far left) on how the industry should best ensure the Open Gateway project doesn’t go the same way as previous failed operator initiatives, Hans Wijayasuriya, CEO, Telecoms & Group EVP, Axiata Group (pictured, middle), highlighted his company’s decision to work with Indonesia’s three other operators to initially launch various API services, rather than go it alone. And this is now a strategy that could be enhanced further.
“It’s important to paint a global industry perspective, almost like a federation, where we implement a global lattice of telco APIs – so you can plug in anywhere in the world,” commented the operator boss.
“Secondly, telcos should collaborate and breed a new form of co-opetition rather than fighting each other like in the consumer internet. Otherwise there is the risk of disintermediation and value erosion, and that $300 billion market opportunity could fritter away quickly.”
Globe Telecom (Philippines) president and CEO Ernest Cu (pictured, far right) was in agreement, reflecting on his company’s announcement this week it has joined the GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative, a project based around developing common open-source APIs to enable faster deployment of new services.
“I echo the comments around standardisation… let’s make sure the certified APIs are standardised,” he stated, before adding it is critical operators keep a close eye on the security of their networks once they are opened up.
Indonesia is not alone in seeing its operators team on the launch of Open Gateway services; operators in Brazil, Spain and Sri Lanka are among markets where rivals have teamed up to ensure new services work across all the country’s mobile networks.