As the Symbian Foundation comes closer to the roll-out, it is important to realize where the mobile industry is heading. Google Android certainly opened our eyes to what open sourcing the mobile environment could look like, but with Symbian it's another story, the software company is the largest smartphone operating system vendor in the world.

Abhijit Kabra, Senior Executive in Product Software Solutions Practice, Accenture, spoke to PhoneReport's Meraj Chhaya on Accenture's participation in the mobile technology environment. Kabra explained how Accenture works with partners, how it delivers the content to the end-user, and provided important opinions on open-source in the mobile environment.

The Senior Executive extensively supports open-source, and once said in an article published at IT Today that "The open source approach makes sense because it provides long-term stability and sound project design without slowing or preventing innovation that remains an issue of closed source systems. Open development delivers the answer for most electronics and high-tech companies aspiring to achieve high performance".

PhoneReport: "Thank you for joining us for this interview Abhijit. Could you explain to us, and to our readers what Accenture does, both in the corporate, and end-user perspective?"

Abhijit Kabra: "Thank you Meraj. Accenture is designing and developing solutions that would be used by the end-user, and launched by the corporate consumers, or just go directly to the end-user. We are working with handset OEMs and network equipment manufacturers to implement solutions that would ultimately be used by the end-user.

Things like over-the-top applications; or multimedia application nodes that would work on a handset; or mobile widgets, for example. These are the kind of innovative solutions that we've been implementing on handsets.

PhoneReport: "Who are your biggest partners?"

Abhijit Kabra: "We are platinum partners of Symbian, Avanade is the joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, quite a lot of our clients can also be seen as partners when it comes to go-to market strategies. Many times, the products we develop, the services we develop together, are sold in the market to end-consumers, either by the clients, or jointly with Accenture.

PhoneReport: "How is Accenture participating in the mobile technology environment?"

Abhijit Kabra: "For example, let's take this European Tier 1 handset manufacturer. We've been working with them for the last four years, we've helped them set-up a Symbian Development Centre in Bangalore, a low-cost location. The team conducts design and development of Symbian-based applications which are part of latest enterprise handset models, those are native applications in the enterprise handsets.

This has been developed by Accenture almost from scratch. We've been working with a lot of handset OEMs and telecommunication operators in order to help them roll our end-to-end services and solutions.

PhoneReport: "So you basically work as a sub-contractor."

Abhijit Kabra: "A system integrator would be the more correct terminology."

PhoneReport: "Do you focus only on smartphones, or non-smartphones as well?"

Abhijit Kabra: "We focus on the entire range of handset. We've been working for example, on a rural phone project, for a village in India, which can be seen lower than regular non-smartphones, and even lower than usual entry-level devices. It needs the minimum text possible, the minimum key strokes, more intuitive for the person who is not technologically savvy.

PhoneReport: "From your point of view, will smartphones ever replace non-smartphones, ranging to the entry-level phones, or will cost always be a factor?"

Abhijit Kabra: "Cost will definitely be a factor, but the way we are seeing it, is that the costs are going down so much that it will come to a point that the difference between a low-end phone and the cost of smartphone might be substantially low.

Things like operator subsidization, advertising-based revenue models, will further reduce the difference. Boundaries between non-smartphones and smartphones might not exist to the extent they exist today.

PhoneReport: "Once again from your perspective, do you believe that smartphones will replace computers?

Abhijit Kabra: "Accenture's point of view is basically what we call a "tri-vergence" of three screens. We feel that the end-user is dealing with three screens in the day-to-day life. They are the TV, computer or laptop, and the last one is your mobile phone. We see the boundaries separating these three screens coming together and vanishing.

In that sense, we see that the user will be able to seamlessly use one application from one screen to the other screen. There would be increasing interoperability or handover between from one application running on the phone to the PC, or vice-versa.

PhoneReport: "You are basically looking into convergence. Manufacturers and software developers have been looking for convergence since the very beginning of technology. How soon do you believe this can happen?"

Abhijit Kabra: "We see this already happening. The industry is taking baby steps towards that.

The biggest driver would be the user experience. The users are expecting rich, personalized, and very easy to use, internet and communications experience independent of what screen they are using, independent of what device they are using, either the TV, laptop, or handset.

The expectations and continuous demands from the users will drive this convergence."

PhoneReport: "The Symbian Foundation will wrap several interfaces into one. From your point of view, will there be less confusion to the consumer, or will there be an actual lack of variety of the consumer?"

Abhijit Kabra: "The fact that Symbian Foundation is going open will definitely expedite innovation. It will leverage from the open community, which means that more and more applications will be developed for the Symbian platform.

Innovation will come, and the fact that more and more developers are working now on developing applications, will help this grow.

From that we see new things being available for the end-user, thus fuelling growth. At the same time, we need to see how different players, such as OEMs, continue to have their differentiation, given that everybody will be using the same core base, which is the Symbian platform.

That will define in which direction this open platform will take shape.

PhoneReport: "Just going back to the question. Won't a single user interface become boring for the consumer?"

Abhijit Kabra: "You have this larger user community, that's where the feedback will be getting in, and these developers will find more innovative ways of introducing new user experience or new user interfaces.

One of the things we are talking about in this show is how mobile widgets will take user interaction to the next level. The UI gets "redefined" with the mobile widgets.

Surface computing will eventually enter the mobile world, and Symbian will also have to adapt to surface computing.

All this innovation will enrich the user experience in time-to-time, and I believe that the user experience is going to be compelling, even from the Symbian platform."

PhoneReport: "Let me quote from page 4, Open for Business booklet by Accenture:

By sharing the open infrastructure, companies can get products to market more quickly at reduced risk

What about competition? If everyone is going to share a single system, there will be no competition."

Abhijit Kabra: "This is the fundamental principle on which the open development community remains on. You get certain things which are already readily built by someone, which is the open platform, but you create certain applications on top of something that is already readily available in the open platform.

As long as it's your own creation on top of this open platform, you don't have to necessarily submit it back to the community. What you do have to give back is something that you change from the core that you have taken from the open community.

What I see is that, and this is exactly what Apple did: they took an open platform, but they created their own UI framework on top of that, without really taking the open platform, and because of that, they have been able to keep a differentiation, and generated a large amount of revenue."

PhoneReport: "How open can companies go before they reduce profits to zero? Symbian has lost all its profits, not that it really matters to Nokia, but let's look at Microsoft, for example, they couldn't licence Windows as open-source, as that's the major factor in their revenue."

Abhijit Kabra: "What goes away is this licensing model of revenue in open source development environment. New innovative models of revenue are coming up. Look at for example how Google is generating revenue from advertisement-based revenue models. Those are things that will come in the mobile handset industry, and who knows, there might be new innovative models that might come up.

Maybe you will lose revenue in terms of royalty and licence feeds, but surely new revenue models will come up for this open community to become sustainable and profitable."

PhoneReport: "There are quite a few Open Source consortia at the moment. What was suppose to unify and help the developer, might lead to compatibility problems. How much space is there for competition?"

Abhijit Kabra: "Interoperability and compatibility is something that the ecosystem will have to ensure, because if my product is compatible with a handset, it's not going to work, not everyone will use it.

For my product to be usable and successful in the market, myself as a developer, or myself as a manufacturer, need to ensure that my product is compatible when I launch it in the market.

From that perspective, compatibility is essential and will be addressed by developers and manufacturers. When it comes to competition, opening up platforms or opening the open development community itself is creating healthy competition among innovators and developers, so whoever comes with smarter applications, better user experience, better innovation, better ideas, he will win in the competition."

PhoneReport: "Can hardware and software companies continue to have a healthy relationship or will the rivalry between software companies affect the hardware manufacturer? For example, HTC is using both Google Android and Windows Mobile phones. Won't that be a problem for the hardware manufacturer?"

Abhijit Kabra: "I don't think so. The hardware manufacturer would gain by creating different products by using different operating systems.

As far as the end-user is concerned, he gets more variety, more choice to benefit from. This will continue, people will continue to have choice, manufacturers will continue to have multiple streams. Nokia uses for example, Linux, Symbian, which will continue to be there."

PhoneReport: "Won't this elevate costs as well? For example, if Motorola uses ten different operating systems, they will need a different team for each platform."

Abhijit Kabra: "We definitely see many companies in the process of getting third-party components into their products, and they have fragmented themselves, and companies have started realising this, and we see many companies currently running consolidation programs, wherein they are trying to reduce the number of suppliers to select few key-suppliers, thereby driving the management costs down."

PhoneReport: "Do you see the handset manufacturer going the same way it went with the network operator? For example, the Apple iPhone was locked for a long time to AT&T in the US. Will we see the same with software? For example, will Google make a deal with HTC to lock their phones to Android? Do you see this going the same route?"

Abhijit Kabra: "As I mentioned earlier, the end-user will continue to demand multiple choices. There are niche pockets, niche requirements, that will keep coming up, and that would ensure that multiple streams will remain alive in the marketplace.

This situation will continue, where you have multiple choices, multiple streams running parallel and having healthy competition over one another."

PhoneReport: "In open source, what security problems do smartphones face? I read in Accenture's booklet that you did name security problems."

Abhijit Kabra: "Mobile usage is increasing day by day, which is also imposing certain obstacles and issues in terms of security. If the entire ecosystem does not manage this well, it might limit the growth of the mobile industry asset.

We see on one side, the usage increase, and on the other side, the viruses, piracy and these kinds of attacks also becoming more prevalent. The ecosystem will proactively work, to counter, and to take measures to protect themselves from such threats.

Very soon we will be getting anti-virus for mobile computing, vaccines for mobile computing, and the whole ecosystem working towards this, although I do feel that this initiative will be lead by operators because that's where they can establish a lot of control over the security on the data that is being exchanged wirelessly over their networks."

PhoneReport: "Once again, while referring to Accenture's booklets, I found the term "Unified Memory", which is becoming common in computing in general. Please explain in to us."

Abhijit Kabra: "The trend that we are predicting is that as more and more data-rich application are being used by the end-user, the memory capability of your device will be continuously under stress, and more and more memory would be required to access and store heavy-data and content, and in response to this challenge, the industry would potentially have remote memory available for a handset application. What that would mean is that a user on a handset would be able to configure remote memory from wireless internet, and would be able to use as if it was memory locally available to the end-user, and that's what we feel it would become an important trend, memory-as-a-service, other than dedicated memory on your handset."

PhoneReport: "How are you addressing this issue?"

Abhijit Kabra: "We are working on evolving end-to-end framework called unified-memory-as-a-service, where we would help to define what kind of APIs would be needed to make this service work. Things like creating memory on-the-go, configuring, re-configuring, and depending upon the revenue model, there could even be APIs for billing and charging on the usage of the memory."

PhoneReport: "So what's next in the mobile world?"

Abhijit Kabra: "Surface computing is potentially the biggest, disruptive innovation we could see in the mobile world."

PhoneReport: "How do you see surface computing interacting in a handset, very specifically?"

Abhijit Kabra: "When you look at a handset, currently there is the display as one of the surfaces, that is one electronic component, but what if other surfaces are also electronically enabled? They can physically sense other objects and be able to react on different objects and for example, the back cover of a handset could be surface-enabled, and can sense my finger touches, and by using finger touches, I would be able to manipulate data without the need of a keypad or a mouse.

What I could potentially do is I take my phone and tap my finger to open the camera, I can keep clicking pictures, using my thumbs I can zoom in, I can write captions to these pictures, and place it on another surface-enabled device, and all of the pictures get downloaded on to my surface-enabled table. This will create new intuitive way of handling data and interacting with the mobile handset. This will expand the capabilities of mobile use."

PhoneReport: "When can we see a demo of this?"

Abhijit Kabra: "Microsoft has announced its surface-computing product called Microsoft Surface, and AT&T has implemented it at their stores. The iPhone has implemented multi-touch screen capabilities. More will definitely come soon."

PhoneReport: "How do you see IPTV and VoIP converged in the internet world in terms of adoption, use, and future?"

Abhijit Kabra: "Whatever is happening on the internet, the PC environment, it will come to the mobile environment. Most of the innovation and most of the growth that we currently see in the internet and PC world, will automatically be available for mobile users."

PhoneReport: "Moving away from technology, how is the current economic crisis affecting Accenture?"

Abhijit Kabra: "Our financial year ended in August, in which we posted a tremendous growth. Traditionally Accenture performs well during economic downturns, because that is the exact time when our clients need our help, and they seek Accenture's help in tiding their work to avert the crisis. We see more and more clients coming to us, and we are happy to be able to provide them help and services even in these downturn days, and that way we don't seem to be having a big impact from this economic downturn."

PhoneReport: "Abhijit, thank you very much for your thoughts and explanations on the current status of the mobile world, we hope to meet you next year."

Abhijit Kabra: "Thank you Meraj, see you then".

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