OMA elects Alvinen for third term — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{Chairman and diplomat} OMA elects Alvinen for third term

12 Dec 2004 at 08:39 GMT Timo Poropudas

One of the largest mobile industry alliances ever – by any measure – The Open Mobile Alliance re-elected Jari Alvinen as the chairman of the board in its plenary meeting last month in Barcelona.

Alvinen has been chairing OMA since its inception in 2002. He is starting his third one year term with over 400 companies as members.

OMA has a key role in developing industry wide standards and patterns. The goal is to speed up mobile industry by creating common platforms and solution so that end users are able to consume mobile industry services from different service providers using products from different vendors.

The organization has four membership levels with differing fees. The main role belongs to sponsoring members that also automatically to the fairly large board of directors.

The most powerful mobile, telecom and it-industry companies belong to OMA – including Microsoft, Nokia, Ericsson and Vodafone.

Alvinen is an engineer by schooling. In his regular job at Nokia he also works with standardization efforts with the title Director, Standardization and Industry Relations, Nokia Technology Platforms.

Diplomacy

Alvinen’s main asset in his position as the chairman is diplomacy. The organization is full of competing interests and no amount of good will can prevent member companies from bolting from united fronts or timetables if they see a compelling business case.

“Companies make their own decisions,” says Alvinen. “OMA has power over them.”

The case in point is Nokia’s strong takeoff in push-to-talk –technology. OMA’s technical standard will be finalized in January. But Nokia has announced over 30 deals where it has sold PoC-solutions to operators. The acronym PoC comes from Push-to-Talk over Cellular.

Alvinen comments his employer’s pre-standard sales push by saying that it was the company’s decision. Neither will he acknowledge that other telecom vendors involved in PoC development started to slow down the process in order to catch up to Nokia before the standard is ready. “Such behavior has been talked about in the standardization world.”

Alvinen admits that the beginning of OMA was difficult time when the five different industry forums came together with differing backgrounds and cultures. The transfer of technical skills was not a problem but otherwise there were – not contradictions – “hot debates.”

OMA has another media performer in its working groups besides PoC. It is DRM, digital right management. Working DRM is absolutely essential for mobile distribution of content. The content owners will not release their content to be freely distributed in mobile internet before they believe that they will be guaranteed compensation.

Right now it seems that OMA DRM is fitting the bill, but there are multiple players who choose to use their own DRM-systems. Apple is the best known example of the companies that depend on their own encryption in order to make sure that the digital music sells also its iPod devices.

Other officials of the OMA board of directors come from Cingular, Vodafone, Openwave, IBM and NTT Docomo.