The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and GlobalPlatform have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to advance their joint initiatives in an official framework. The agreement will allow the organizations to share industry and technical knowledge, and synchronize specification development that will advance mobile services across a range of industries.
GlobalPlatform, the international specification body for smart card infrastructure, and ETSI's Smart Card Platform (SCP) committee, the standardization body which provided the core specifications for more than 3 billion smart cards in the past year alone, have maintained a general liaison relationship for a number of years, to harmonize their respective activities in the fields of over-the-air (OTA) application download and management of applications. As a result of this previous collaboration, over two billion SIM cards worldwide are estimated to use the technology defined by the organizations to enable OTA application downloads for 3G and GSM mobile networks.
By signing the MoU the two parties have formally strengthened their collaboration efforts, and plan to replicate the achievements of their joint initiatives into other areas of their respective offerings. Initial activity will focus on developing technology that will facilitate the delivery through the SIM of contactless services which ‘connect' multiple sectors such as mobile, healthcare, banking and transit, with a simple model that will enable end users to manage their active contactless services in a mobile handset.
Sebastien Tormos, GlobalPlatform Chairman and Director of Marketing at Datacard Group, comments: "The on-going relationship between our associations will ensure the delivery of a consistent and interoperable SIM infrastructure. GlobalPlatform looks forward to extending the usage of its technology inside ETSI's framework, which will increase adoption of GlobalPlatform's neutral specifications, and sharing our diverse market knowledge with ETSI to advance the joint work initiatives."
Dr Klaus Vedder, Chairman of ETSI's Smart Card Platform committee and Group Senior Vice President and Head of the Telecommunications Division at Giesecke & Devrient (G&D), said: "Both organizations will mutually benefit from GlobalPlatform's cross-industry expertise and ETSI's leading role in the telecommunications industry. The combined knowledge and experience will provide the means to establish a worldwide harmonized infrastructure required for the sustainable advancement of SIM-based contactless services across industry sectors, bringing many benefits to the end-user."