Telecom carriers have often been told to follow the likes of Amazon and Google and open their networks to developers en masse via public application progam interfaces (APIs). Carriers have obvious reasons for being wary of such an approach; to name two: (1) The fear of being reduced to a ‘dump pipe’ provider as a result and the difficulty in trying the alternative in an open world: ensuring to end users the service quality of countless unknown garage-built apps. (2) It’s not entirely clear just yet how lucrative the approach would be for carriers or even how lucrative it has been for Amazon and Google.
The new cloud-computing offering Verizon has announced today, Computing as a Service, is a clear departure from Amazon’s approach. But Verizon did tell Telephony it may introduce open APIs this year as part of the new architecture. It’s not at all clear just how open they would be (open just to large enterprise clients, for Verizon-approved apps?). And Verizon itself appears not to have completely settled on that question internally. Stay tuned.