It is official, RCS launches in 2011 in major markets. RCS-e new approach, our views

This afternoon during the GSMA RCS Seminar at Mobile World Congress, 5 of the biggest carriers: Telefonica, Vodafone, Orange, TIM, T-Mobile announced their full commitment to RCS and announced the launch of fully interoperated RCS services between second half of 2011 and first quarter of 2012. These leading service providers took the lead and presented a previously agreed subset of RCS 2.0 branded as RCS-e as their alternative.
For us, Solaiemes, it is a good move, stop thinking about new releases 3.0. 4.0 and so on and deciding finally to walk the walk and stop talking the talk :-). More important, this new spec is open for adoption to all carriers interested and open to ecosystem.
RCS-e changes the approach for presence, moving from presence server to a dynamic capabilities discovering based on "SIP OPTIONS". From our point of view it is a minor change in our platforms, we scheduled 3-4 weeks to adapt Solaiemes RCS Thin Client Server and RCS Solution Gateway. Solaiemes first product, LiveServe, an IMS VideoShare application server is already supporting "SIP OPTIONS" for discovering capabilities.
We hope this big move from carriers will be reflected in their budgets for RCS, and start investing to match the tentative launch dates they announced today.

Solaiemes Team.