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.

WIMS 2.0. Solaiemes, partner of this initiative.

WIMS 2.0 is a recent initiative promoted by Telefonica trying to converge WEB 2.0 concepts with the new carrier enablers coming with IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). Solaiemes joined the initial partner list of this initiative from the begining. This Telefonica initiative is a very good move to boost mobile services and increase the mobile data users.
Solaiemes vision matches the final goals of WIMS 2.0 Manifesto. We believe walled-garden is not a valid model to take profit (consumer, MNO, service provider) of all the cellular networks can offer, but the bit pice aproach is ok for personal computing but it lack of the needed usability when we are talking about mobile devices, and succesful services should be addressed to mass market with heterogeneus device types.
We believe in network capabilities and common device features to deliver compelling user experiences, and to reduce adoption curve lengths of new services. In spite of IMS adoption is being carried very slowly, IMS and their associated initial services as PTT, VideoShare, Presence, will be enabling a common interface wide range of services.
If we analyze properly the reasons of SMS unexpected huge success, perhaps the main reasons are:

• common interface, you can do a lot of things (message a friend, tele-vote, sending message to be inserted in TV program, buying ringtones, ok to banking operations...)
• supported in all devices, then all services have initially all population as possible target user.
• device suppliers had realized of SMS importance and simplified the user interface, (Shorcuts to compose, iTap, etc).

Solaiemes is working to demonstrate with compelling user experiencies that VideoShare, PTT and mobile browser with push technologies will become the key revenue (for MNO's) and key service enabler (for users) next future. Our target is then, aligned with WIMS 2.o goal.

We are happy to cooperate inside WIMS 2.0 with other partners as Alcatel-Lucent, Unkasoft, UPM and Kimia helping to make feasible new concepts of Mobility.