Here’s my take:

1. HSIs would deal with partner licensing, integration, validation, testing, project management, etc, i.e they would be involved after the partner ISV has sealed the deal with the operator. The long sales cycle problem applies up to the point of sealing the deal. Operators would pass on the liability for potential failures onto HSIs, who would in turn pass it onto the ISVs themselves.

2. Operators would want to take partner management away from the OEM so that they control which features/services are deployed on the OEM platform and have control of the overall integration project (as long as they can get away with it). Letting the OEM manage partner apps means the OEM can always come up with excuses, e.g. partner integration took too long and delayed the device launch, etc. In effect this takes the OEM outside the service delivery equation (well, almost).

Makes sense ?

Andreas

And if the operator is only looking at contained partner applications (and not at container technology) wouldn’t it be better to have the OEM handle the application integration instead of bringing in an HSI?

You ‘re right - we need to differentiate between ‘container technology’ and ‘contained partner applications’.

European operators are about contained platform applications mostly (although Vodafone has in the past experiemented with container technology in the form of VSCL/VFX). Japanese operators are about container technology (DoJa/MOAP, BREW, POP-i) AND contained partner applications (e.g. Acrodea being specified by both DoCoMo and KDDI on all handsets from end 07).

Andreas

That is a much more technological approach, and it is not the same as simply specifying and sourcing a set of ISV custom apps, to be installed on top of a standard Open OS that has no special “layer” or “API” or “framework” specifically created by that Operator. European operators cannot really duplicate the approch of Japanese or even US Operators, so their Container strategy is just about the content of the container, not really “container technology”. do you agree?