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MOBILE services and product companies have been hit hard by the slowdown. The premise that customers will pay for wireless connectivity has been tested severely and many companies that based their business model on this premise have floundered.

But all is not lost, yet, says Raj Tumuluri, Chief Executive Officer, Openstream, the mobile communications and computing products company. In a chat with eWorld, Tumuluri elaborates on why he is optimistic about this market.

"Given the popularity of the Internet, all the hype that we have seen over the last year is primarily about companies providing mere wireless access to the Internet. Unfortunately, such replication of the Internet-access experience from the desktop to a Palmtop did not go too well with the user-community,'' Tumuluri says. Not without reason, given the size of the screen and the complexity of data entry. The market is moving towards convergence of technologies that enable a user to use speech, wireless application protocol etc, where there is a combination of technologies and methods of interaction with various data sources. Founded in 1997, Openstream Inc is focussed on enterprise, financial institutions and communications service providers. Indian operations, started in 2000, were used primarily as a development and support centre for the US corporation until 2002. This year, though, the company started marketing operations in India and the Asia-Pacific region. Openstream's solution enables customers (enterprises, for instance) to push customised and relevant data to individual users as well as provide value-added services, says Tumuluri.

Market drivers

The mobile workforce and the intelligent enterprise will be willing to pay — but only for services and products that go beyond mere wireless access to the Internet. "We believe that businesses will drive the way mobile services are accepted. The mobile services market will be driven by people on the move who do not mind paying for these applications. Enterprises that have the field force are the ones who will be willing to pay for these services," says Tumuluri. "The proliferation of the new Smart phones that combine the functionality of a cell-phone, pager and Internet-ready Organizer or PDA (personal digital assistant) only validates our view that multi-modality will drive widespread adoption of wireless data applications.''

Early wireless enablers focussed on very narrow mobility applications, such as unified messaging. "When we talk to our customers, we find that business users are looking to access more than one type of application data while they are on the move,'' says Tumuluri. In addition to mobile access to e-mail or personal information, mobile users demand access to several types of datafeeds to efficiently transact business — to buy or sell products or services. The challenge, Tumuluri says, is to map disparate enterprise application datafeeds into one easily accessible data source. "At Openstream, we provide both the infrastructure software and the tools that unify disparate application datafeeds into one data source that can be interacted with in a multi-modal manner.'' Further, a secure and personalised delivery of this unified data source is very important to customers - still pretty much an untapped segment.

Market analysts have identified a $20-30 billion global market for network build-out spending, enterprise software spending and mobile transaction enablement. "Openstream offers customers short-message service centres and WAP Gateways to carriers and enterprises; infrastructure software to enterprise customers that allows them to map disparate datafeeds into one unified data source and to push that to any kind of mobile device to their employees or their customers; and a suite of software products to enable mobile banking, trading; and credit-card fraud-management solution for some of our financial service provider clients,'' says Tumuluri.

Better times ahead

The economic slowdown is levelling the playing field and giving "us at Openstream an opportunity to share our approach to mobility and to market our software products to enterprise customers and resellers alike — in time for the expected return to increased carrier and corporate spending in late 2002,'' says Tumuluri.

In the near term, the strategy will be to identify and take advantage of the drivers for adoption of mobile applications. The key driver today is providing email-type-access. The "killer mobility application" has not yet been conceived, Tumuluri says, but believes it will have a combination of data unification, secure delivery of unified data across converged wireline-wireless voice-data networks, multi-modal access including the use of speech recognition, a high degree of user personalisation, and actionable, intelligent push technology.

Plans for India

Openstream's customers are wireless switch manufacturers, operators, banks, brokerage firms, credit card issuers and enterprises — mostly US-based. "But we have extensive experience dealing closely with carriers in Europe and Asia, so our approach is not to focus only on the US marketplace, but to also tap into demand in Europe and in Asia.'' And Openstream's presence in India is an entry point for the Pan Asia-Pacific region "where we see a lot of demand for the type of products that we are developing and selling.''

As the barriers to adoption of mobile business go down — thanks to improved bandwidth, quality of service, reliability, and security - Openstream expects it will be an easier sell, with the enterprise rapidly adopting these technologies and realising strong process and cost efficiencies. "We hope to offer several such productivity-enhancing services to Indian enterprises over the next couple of years and hope to double our workforce in India over the next few months to launch these services in the Indian marketplace,'' says Tumuluri.

The key challenges, however, are going to be the cost of devices and development of vernacular ASR and TTS (automated speech recognition and text-to-speech engines). Openstream says it is pioneering these efforts with some of the leading vendors in this space to offer solutions for the Indian marketplace.

priya@thehindu.co.in

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