The Linux Foundation‘s CAMARA project, an open source community addressing telco industry API interoperability, has announced storing momentum following its move to a directed fund last fall. Additionally, CAMARA shared details of its presence and activity onsite at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain.
Initiated in 2021 by a small number of telco operators, vendors and hyperscalers, CAMARA officially launched in February 2022 with 22 initial partners and graduated to a funded model in September 2023, with 250 participating organizations and over 750 contributors. Since then, the project has grown to 950+ contributors and 320 organizations, along with more 20+ API families and sub-projects, and growing.
Additionally, the project has established a Governing Board, Technical Steering Committee, an Outreach Committee, and an End User Council to manage collaboration at scale.
“CAMARA’s rapid growth is testament to the need for APIs to become more open, more accessible and easier to monetize,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, at the Linux Foundation. “Active, open collaboration among network operators, cloud providers, application developers and technology vendors within CAMARA is driving broad engagement and development of connected solutions.”
CAMARA offers new opportunities for collaboration between telecoms, marketplaces/aggregators and end customers. A critical success factor is also the established alignment with GSMA Open Gateway and TMForum about forming an open, global, accessible API ecosystem. The benefit for customers and developers comes in the form of consistent and user-friendly access to network capabilities, thus enabling developers to seamlessly deploy applications to run consistently across telco networks and countries. This prevents fragmentation and empowers faster, more versatile advancement of global application portability and broad industry adoption of new features and capabilities.
In addition to its broad portfolio of participating organizations, the CAMARA fund is composed of 10 Premium sponsors (including Accenture, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Orange, Telefonica, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile), 6 General sponsors (including CableLabs, Centillion, Charter Communications, invia, Scenera, Shabodi), and one Associate sponsor ( OpenID).
CAMARA at Mobile World Congress 2024
The CAMARA community will be active on site at Mobile World Congress Barcelona. In addition to sponsor and contributor organization’s hosting CAMARA-based demos and showcases in-booth (look for CAMARA signs in partner booths across the show floor), the project will host:
CAMARA Meet and Greet: Monday, 26 February from 12:00 – 13:30 in the Hall 8 Knowledge Zone, room CC8.14. Anyone interested in learning more about CAMARA is invited to attend, no RSVP necessary.
CAMARA Community Reception: Tuesday, 27 February, 19:00 – 21:00. Sponsored by RedHat with collaboration from Telefonica, CAMARA will host an evening reception at the Eurohotel Gran Via Fira, Carrer de les Ciències, 98-100, adjacent to the Fira center. Open Gateway DevCon: Wednesday, 28 February, 15:00 – 19:00, Partner Theater 2, Hall 8. CAMARA will join a panel on the “The collaboration between GSMA, CAMARA and TM Forum.