AT&T announces new programs to promote its innovation program (AT&T Foundry)

Mike Sapien, Ovum analyst

LAS VEGAS, USA: At AT&T's Developers’ Summit at CES, AT&T announced new programs that promoted its innovation program (AT&T Foundry) and continuing support for opening up its network.

The API platform (powered by Apigee) has been infused with some additional detail and six disparate areas that are: Payment, Uverse with Wireless, MMS/SMS, Location based services, device capabilities and mHealth Alpha. This has put more structure and support to AT&T’s open network initiatives that were mentioned at last year’s summit. Now there is more substance and application details to this program and platform.

In addition, there was also an announcement of AT&T joining the OpenStack initiative which is significant as AT&T is the first US carrier to join. It is further evidence of the strong support for open mobile application development and service enablement that AT&T has been promoting in enabling more cloud based services and innovation from external parties including its developers.

With the sponsorship of Microsoft’s Windows phone platform, we expect to see more enterprise applications as by-products of the combined developers and AT&T internal product development.

The network is the oxygen’ was one of the key mantras shared by John Donovan in his presentation. Although it is an interesting analogy for an application centric audience, one has to wonder how AT&T will monetize this ‘oxygen’ for many of the data hungry applications, devices and end users. And there was a mention of global capabilities but there wasn’t any detail on services that were going to be available outside the US.