Last year at the Mobile World Congress we couldn’t believe Ericsson is announcing its app store offering. This year ZTE is joining the party with its solution called iMarket.
The idea of both telecom equipment vendors is to make some additional money out of small and medium-sized carriers all around the world and deliver them a completely branded (white label) solution. As a result, these smaller carriers should be able to increase their ARPUs from use of mobile data among their customers. Big operator groups such as Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and Telefónica already have their own app stores up and running.
Designed as a cloud-based service, iMarket will allow operators to manage their own-branded delivery services and content. ZTE will provide operators with platform deployment, operation consultancy and software applications according to the individual operators’ requirements.
The Chinese company’s first client is China Unicom, which is the world’s largest CDMA operator. ZTE and China Unicom have been cooperating on a wide range of programmes including services design, services operations and developer recruitment…