Al Jaber looks to spearhead Arab application programming interface

Abdul Al Jaber, the former CEO of Zain Jordan and COO of Zain Group, is set to work on the establishment and development of an Arab application programming interface (API), Comm. can reveal.

Towards the end of June, Zain announced suddenly Al Jaber’s plans to leave the operator at the end of that month, stating that his resignation was for personal reasons. He was replaced as Zain Jordan CEO by Ahmad Al Hanandeh, effective July 1, 2011.

Al Jaber has been pushing the idea of a pan-Arab API for some time now, believing the development of large-scale applications ecosystems incorporating the operator cloud, industry clouds (such as the Wholesale Applications Community or OneAPI), and commercial clouds (mobile cloud providers, enterprise solution clouds, data centre clouds, etc), represent multiple new wholesale application channels for operators.

He believes the formation of a common API for Arab operators would be an opportunity that represents an incremental US$3 billion+ revenue prospect of participating operators through 2015, dependant on the market launch date.

The adoption of an industry-wide API-based business model, Al Jaber says, will also help lower barriers to entry for web players by offering a standard entry point to operators’ networks. This in turn creates an opportunity to resell network capabilities; such as location, messaging; and payments to a new market of developers via an industry agreed standard.

He estimates an Arab API would also increase the urgency to get applications to market, and create market value as a result of the expansion of focus on data revenue by Arab operators.