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The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is a standards body which develops open standards for the mobile industry.
Principles
- Mission. Its mission is to provide interoperable service enablers working across countries, operators and mobile terminals.
- Network-agnostic. The OMA restricts itself to the standardisation of applicative protocols; OMA presumes the existence of a networking technology specified by outside parties. OMA specifications are agnostic of the particular cellular network technologies being used to provide networking and actual data transport. In particular, OMA specifications for a given function are the same with either GSM, UMTS or CDMA2000 networks.
- Voluntary. The OMA is not a formal government-sponsored standards organization like the ITU, but rather a forum for industry stakeholders to agree on common specifications for products and services. The goal is that by agreeing on common standards, stakeholders will be able to "share slices from a larger pie"; but strictly speaking, adherence to the standards is entirely voluntary as the OMA does not have a mandative role.
- "FRAND" Intellectual Property Licensing. Members owning intellectual property rights (e.g. patents) on technologies that are essential to the realization of a specification agree in advance to provide licenses to their technology on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms to other members of the OMA.
- Legal status. The OMA's legal status is that of a British limited company (cf. bylaws).
History
The OMA was created in June 2002 as an answer to the proliferation of industry forums each dealing with a few application protocols: the WAP Forum (focused on browsing and device provisioning protocols), the Wireless Village (focused on instant messaging and presence), the SyncML Consortium (focused on data synchronization), the Location Interoperability Forum, the Mobile Games Interoperability Forum and the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum. Each of these forums had its bylaws, its decision-taking procedures, its release schedules, and in some instances there was some overlap in the specifications, causing duplication of work. The OMA was created to gather these initiatives under a single umbrella.
Members include traditional wireless industry players such as equipment and mobile systems manufacturers (Ericsson, Siemens, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Philips, Motorola...) and mobile operators (Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile...), but also software vendors (Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle Corporation...).
Links with other standards bodies
The OMA links (or, in standardization parlance, "liaises") with other standards bodies on a regular basis to avoid overlap in specifications:
Example specifications
The OMA maintains a number of specifications, including
- Browsing specifications, now called "Browser and Content", previously called WAP browsing. In their current version, these specifications rely essentially on XHTML MP.
- MMS specifications for multimedia messaging
- OMA DRM specifications for Digital Rights Management
- OMA IMPS (Instant Messaging and Presence) specification, which is a system for instant messaging on mobile phones (formerly known as Wireless Village).
- OMA DS specification for Data Synchronization using SyncML.
- OMA DM specification for Device Management using SyncML.
- OMA BCAST specification for Mobile Broadcast Services.
External links
"Open Mobile Alliance"