Neustar this week at CTIA officially took the wraps off its Intelligent Cloud Service, which allows the developer community to access its own and its service provider customers’ network assets and data, and use those resources to offer enriched applications and Web-based services.

Those assets could include location information; demographic information, such as which customers are on what plans; and more. Neustar also brings to the table with this solution its digital rights locker solution, so end users can enjoy applications and content on any device; marketing and social networking tools; and an API for carrier look-up by phone number, which it launched this week.

While there’s a movement under way of individual service providers opening making select network resources available to developers, Chris Drake, Neustar’s vice president of carrier services, says different service providers have different implementations of the OMA standard.

The Intelligent Cloud Service, meanwhile, offers a single interface and a single supply contract through which developers can access multiple service providers’ resources.

Drake adds that the Neustar Intelligent Cloud Service also addresses compliance, privacy, age appropriateness of content and other issues not addressed by other industry efforts like the Wholesale Application Community, or WAC (News - Alert), which is releasing specifications to help expedite the creation and support of applications that can run on any device, any operating system and any member mobile operators’ network.

Cable TV company Rogers, and Sprint (News - Alert), are among the service providers that have announced their intentions to use the Neustar Intelligent Cloud Service. Sprint and another tier 1 service provider in North America expect to go live on the service in mid April.

Major network equipment suppliers like Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson (News - Alert) have in recent months introduced cloud-based offers in an effort to help service providers to avail their networks to the developer community, Drake says, but he classifies the Ericsson solution as more of an interconnection solution and the Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) solution as targeted primarily at advertising. In any case, he adds, those companies will have a hard time motivating their sales forces to sell such cloud-based solutions.

“It will not be as easy as they think to get the attention,” he says.