Our view from past Rich Communication 2011 event in Munich.

Last week we attended the Rich Communication 2011 event in Munich, we participated in a panel defending our view about consider and deploying RCS-e as a platform to enable use cases and not a mere only person to person messaging. We explained our view in the panel, and previously in our demo slot we showed how we are this feasible with APIs and Thin Clients. Also we presented first time the demo of our new product RCS-e Personal Manager.

The G5 representatives from Vodafone, Telefonica, Deustche Telekom, Orange and TIM explained the project and the timeline, with all of them to offer the service by the H1 2012. It seems most of device manufacturers are committed to include RCS-e natively, and GSMA will launch a RCS-e App Client to cover other mainstream platforms (IOs & Android).
There was a lot of discussions about if RCS-e is the SMS replacement or something else (our view), how to monetize, and how to get traction in a very competitive segment with several OTTs (over the top) with interesting solutions.
In our opinion, both, companies creating communication services using the data connectivity (commonly referred as OTT) and telcos may be not considered full antagonists or deadly rivals. We believe in cooperation models and innovation to delight the users. A good communication shared model will allow internet companies with focus on e(m)-commerce, location, etc perhaps try to reach the users using universal communication services rather than creating a new "messenger" only for their use case. The task for telcos is how to design their wholesale offering of API's and perhaps some mediation of API usage to create a powerful model to boost mobility and user/customer engagement.
Finally, from the demos, we may say that there are RCSe available clients from different vendors, device client SDKs, and available server side REST APIs (ours) :-)
The networking was very good with senior representatives from telcos, leading vendors and analysts with different points of view, all of them enriching the discussion.

The technology is here, and time is gold to launch and let the ecosystem work.