DALLAS, United States—Nokia continued its massive push for its open mobile architecture initiative by signing some of the world’s largest information and technology infrastructure and application server vendors, including BEA Systems, Borland Software, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. The move could put further pressure on Microsoft.
The announcement comes a month after the formation of the initiative, at which time the company signed some of the world’s largest wireless carriers and manufacturers, including AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, mmo2, NTT DoCoMo, Motorola, Texas Instruments, NEC, Toshiba and Symbian.
Nokia’s standards push involving information technology (IT) companies centers around a mobile extension for Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition-based application servers, a move those involved with the initiative said will lead to the development of uniform mobile application programming interfaces. This will allow developers to easily incorporate wireless extensions into their applications, the companies said, and thus fuel the worldwide growth of mobile services and third-party software innovation. Java and Third Generation Partnership Project-compliant technologies like Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) 2.0, xHTML, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and SyncML will also play a role in the initiative.
The initiative encompasses software modules for mobile handset vendors and the corresponding server solutions, Nokia said. By following consistent global and open standards, the companies involved in the initiative said they will be able to provide their customers with a selection of different competitive, yet interoperable solutions and services. This will promote significant industry growth, as well as ensure that economies of scale are enjoyed throughout the industry, they said.
The list of companies involved in the initiative are also all aligned against Microsoft. While Microsoft in November said the initiative did not pose a direct threat to the company, the announced support from IT infrastructure and software vendors will likely put pressure on the company.
