Mission Possible

“ISVs will play a very vital role in maximizing the value proposition of various underlying technologies. New technology adaptations by the core network providers are primarily focused on voice, SMSs and data services,” said Manoj Pant, MD, India, Roamware. ISVs provide the icing on the cake by enabling a suite of technology compliant applications and services which utilize the capability of the underlying technology and enable new services and enhanced experience and efficacy for wireless customers. The strength of the ISV community is its focus on consumer needs and service opportunities, which the core network vendors are unable to focus on. For this reason they would continue to be valuable to the wireless consumer value chain as technology keeps evolving over time.

“India is not just a low-cost services center but we do have many organizations coming up with advanced technology products in the mobile space. Our organizations are more than capable of designing and developing the kind of business applications required by the consumers leveraging available local talent,” said Amit Okhandiar, CMD, mlogica.

ISVs and their Offerings
Astute Systems
Focus Areas: Mobile Content Development and Global Publishing.
Applications: Games, Spiritual & Devotional Applications, Utility applications, Business & Financial, BSE Portfolio Tracker as well as Wallpapers, Ringtones, Videos and Themes. Developing IT products, games and applications for stock exchanges and for Corporates

Cellebrum
Focus areas: VAS solutions across platforms like SMS, IVRS, ASR, TTS, WAP, GPRS, USSD. Expertise in the fields of roaming solutions, call processing, protocols and specifications.
Applications: Developed and deployed product offerings on the IVRS platform using DTMF/ASR/TTS technology. The bouquet of services spans across the information, communication and entertainment domain and includes music, gaming, downloads and utility services. The product line includes background music, Pay-4-Me, select caller list, missed call alert, international call back, voice mail system, caller ring back tone. In addition to this SMS gateway, Web2Mobile SMS, SMS 6300, global number solution, roaming solutions are also currently being offered.

Elitecore
Focus areas: Billing solutions that can deliver FMC and data-voice convergence. Driving modularization of Crestel Convergent Billing platform to ensure greater flexibility to providers in solution choice.
Applications: 'Crestel', a convergent billing and customer care solution for wireline and wireless service providers; and 'EliteRADIUS', a real time authentication, authorization and accounting software.

Hellosoft
Focus areas: The company enables mass deployment of multi-mode wireline and wireless devices by providing optimized RISC-based VoIP products with voice quality, QoS, and call switching y designed for next generation end-points.
Applications: Next generation multi-mode mobile handsets, PDAs, IP phones, and ATAs.

Infozech
Focus areas: Focuses on real time transaction processing in transaction critical applications.
Applications: Venturing into the personalized voice solutions space, complementing mobile enabled applications. Providing specialized Next Gen CRM, convergent billing solutions for broadband service providers and customer care solutions for packet-based, converged network environments.

Mars
Focus areas: ERP/CRM space includes consulting on packaged applications, development/support and infrastructure management services.
Applications: Voice and data networking (VoIP and unified communications) and business productivity improvement solutions using ERP and CRM packages.

mlogica
Focus areas: Mobile database applications, RFID, GPS, tracking systems, order processing and home-land security.
Applications: Emergency information systems, tracking system for hunting down terrorists and criminals using RFID and GPS, RFID and biometric based intelligence management systems, PDA solutions for healthcare organizations and security databases

Mobiapps
Focus areas: Terrestrial, satellite and hybrid technologies.
Applications: 'm1375 RF', optimal technology to develop integrated solutions for industrial communications;; 'm100', next generation satellite data communications transceiver designed for the OEM customers; 'm-Trak', fleet management solutions based on GPS/GSM technology, provides real time fleet information.

OnMobile
Focus Areas: VAS, mobile content distribution, one to one direct marketer on mobiles and m-commerce enabler.
Applications: The current suite of multimodal VAS offered include ring back tones, voice portal & WAP, corporate value added services, m-commerce services, media portals and interactive TV programming, in-call network solutions, and customer care-using speech recognition to automate routine call center interactions.

Roamware
Focus areas: Provides value-added voice and data roaming, and voice and messaging solutions.
Applications: Proprietary platform 'Roamware Service Delivery System', using open standards enables integration of multiple mobile applications. Apart from this other products include traffic redirection, signaling relay, optimizer product, virtual home environment, SMS VAS, enhanced messaging products, roaming gateway and network monitoring products.

Softtrends
Focus areas: Mobile device applications. Voice recorder that can be used by anyone, anytime, anywhere; and mobile business applications that help mobilize enterprise data.
Applications: PIM type applications for managing personal data, device applications for audio, video, files and other content sharing. Working on a complete suite of products for warehouse management, on demand messaging using Bluetooth and PVR type applications that support audio streaming.

Current teledensity in India is to the tune of 14% on a national average, which is slated to touch 25% in the next two years. VAS, currently, is presumed to contribute 7-8% of the ARPU. It will also rise proportionally with its contribution touching 10% of ARPU in the next few years. Applications would be developed on the basis of newer technologies such as 3G and WiMAX, which would further boost the mobile market in India.

With the changing technology landscape, a whole new set of solutions will be built by ISVs to provide rapid time-to-revenue, business model flexibility, and real-time transactional processing. The ISVs would play a key role in supporting real-time partner integrations and enabling complex multi-partner revenue sharing and settlements. To capitalize on the opportunity to generate profitable mobile content and entertainment, ISVs will need to understand customer behavior and react to changes quickly enough to make them pay off.