SAN FRANCISCO and BARCELONA, Spain —Mobile World Congress 2022 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and the GSMA, a global organization unifying the mobile ecosystem to discover, develop and deliver innovation foundational to positive business environments and societal change, today announced a new, open source project: “CAMARA – The Telco Global API Alliance”. The global partnership will address challenges in porting and reproducing API services across heterogenous operator and cloud architectures. 

CAMARA will help customer and developer ecosystems by developing an open, global, and accessible API solution with access to operator capabilities, in whatever networks customers are in, allowing applications to run consistently between telco networks and different countries. In addition, CAMARA offers new opportunities for collaboration between network and cloud companies (including telcos, ISVs, device manufacturers, etc.) to address challenges of porting and reproducing API services across heterogeneous operator architectures. This prevents fragmentation of telco and cloud developers and enables faster, more versatile advancement of global portability and broad industry adoption of new features and capabilities.   

A close collaboration has been set up between the CAMARA project and the GSMA’s Operator Platform initiative that is defining a federated platform solution for exposing operator network capabilities to external applications. This collaboration will ensure that developers relying on the CAMARA project’s API solution and abstraction will facilitate users across operator networks.

“We are thrilled to enter into this next chapter of collaboration with the GSMA,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “By harnessing existing open source communities within CNCF, LF Networking, LF Edge and aligning to GSMA’s OPG industry requirements, we are poised to address current challenges in API accessibility.”

“The Operator Platform initiative welcomes new members to join more than 40 leading operators, and 35 ecosystem partners, already working together on requirements and APIs. This type of collaboration with CAMARA is essential in accelerating scale to meet today’s integration demands,” said Henry Calvert, head of Networks, GSMA. “We are very pleased to be working with Linux Foundation, and our membership, on developing reliability and resilience in APIs, and simplifying challenges for our developer communities.”

Learn more about CAMARA during MWC Barcelona in keynote session of: https://www.mwcbarcelona.com/agenda/session/cloud-edge-a-new-approach-to-innovation

More details about “CAMARA – The Telco Global API Alliance”, are also available via GitHub: https://github.com/camaraproject. 

CAMARA is supported by leading industry organizations, including: AT&T, Capgemini, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, GSMA, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Kandy, KDDI, Microsoft, MobiledgeX, Nokia, Orange, NGMN, Scenera, T-Mobile US, TIM, Telefonica, TELUS, the Linux Foundation and Vodafone. 

More details about the GSMA’s Operator Platform initiative (and its closely related Telco Edge Cloud activity), are also at https://www.gsma.com/operatorplatform.