Convergence Plus Journal

NEW DELHI -- ACL Wireless Ltd. (ACL) is a leading provider of wireless instant messaging (WIM) and presence application to mobile operators across Asia. Founded in early 2000, it operates from its wireless R&D center in India and has the Asia Pacific sales office in Malaysia. It pioneered the concept of instant messaging from wireless devices, and was the first company in Asia and among the first in the world to successfully develop and commercially launch such a product.

The company constantly innovates and utilises emerging wireless technologies to provide users a superior messaging experience, which in turn enables operators to leverage their network resources to generate more revenues. Convergence Plus caught up with Sanjay K. Goyal, CEO, ACL Wireless Ltd., to find out more about the company and also the emerging trends in mobile applications in India. Excerpts from the interview:

Convergence Plus: What are the emerging trends in mobile applications in India?

Sanjay K. Goyal: Mobile applications serving the consumer market such as chat, dating and contests have been the primary focus till date. However, the market for enterprise mobile applications is beginning to emerge very strongly, an initial example of this is banking service. We should see more such applications hitting the market in the near future, such as applications for mobile email and mobile instant messaging for corporate users and so on. Next, menu-driven mobile applications using the SMS bearer are gaining popularity in comparison to command-based applications. However, mobile applications still continue to be the niche services. I am fairly confident that mass adoption of mobile applications will happen with mass penetration of GPRS.

CP: How do you see the potential of wireless instant messaging (WIM) in India? Is it complimentary or competitive to SMS?

SKG: WIM is currently available in India on most mobile networks. It has achieved an average of 3 percent penetration level over the SMS bearer, which is a good proof of its acceptance. Over GPRS, WIM is likely to be the defacto messaging service. WIM will most likely achieve mass consumer adoption on 2.5G and future data networks. In October 2001, ACL signed up AirTel, its first customer in India, for the launch of the service on the Delhi network. Today, not only has AirTel gone all India with this service, operators such as Idea, RPG, Escotel and Spice have become valuable customers of ACL WIM.

I think WIM is complimentary to SMS. People who need to send short text messages from mobile to mobile will continue to use SMS. However, people who want to communicate in real-time between mobile phones and PCs, especially youngsters, who want to avail of the fun services such as chat rooms, dating services, friend finder and multiplayer games, will use WIM service.

CP: What are your success stories in India, and the Asia Pacific region?

SKG: ACL's WIM service over SMS is generating over 5 million messages per month in India. This has been very encouraging keeping in view the severe interface limitations of SMS for an application like WIM. In addition, the number of registered users for this service has risen from a 50,000 to about 125,000, in India alone. Today, ACL WIM is among the top three mobile applications, in terms of traffic, on AirTel's and Idea's mobile networks.

ACL has also tied up with five more operators in the past couple of months, thereby increasing its total operator base to 15 and showing quick acceptance of this unique service. The total subscriber reach for this service has also risen from a mere 15 million to about 45 million today. The ACL WIM application is available in about six countries, namely, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, India, Kuwait and Thailand.

CP: How will your products increase the ARPU of the Indian operators?

SKG: It is difficult to predict the impact on the ARPU. However, I can say confidently that WIM is a must-have service for operators and it will continue to be among the top three mobile data application for years to come.

CP: You also had plans to enter European, Middle East and African markets. Have those materialised?

SKG: ACL has already won its first customer in the Middle East by signing up with the largest mobile operator in Kuwait, MTC-Vodafone. The service, "WOW Chat", that will be commercially launched for all the subscribers on the MTC Vodafone networks, is in the final stages of deployment. This association has added 1 million active subscribers to its existing customer base. MTC-Vodafone intends to carry the ACL WIM service in Jordan and Bahrain, thus expanding ACL's footprint in the growing Middle East mobile market.

Also, we have recently teamed up with SmartTrust to distribute the solution globally over the SmartTrust platform. SmartTrust, Sweden has selected our WIM product to provide it to its global 85 mobile operator customers. This has been a major break through for ACL as it has paved the path for acquiring customers in Europe in the quickest possible way. The first commercial launches over the SmartTrust infrastructure have shown service take-up among users to be 100 percent greater than the same service delivered via standard SMS.

CP: Some developers are looking at providing video over GPRS. Do you have any similar applications in the pipeline or otherwise?

SKG: We certainly have video chat as a clearly defined service in the product development roadmap of our WIM technology. We intend to enable people, one on a mobile phone and the other on a PC, to engage in a video chat session. However, we also think that streaming video may be viable only on networks such EDGE or 3G. We are also working on the concept of TV chat, which will enable media companies to interact instantly with mobile users and also facilitate interaction among the mobile users in a given country. For instance, users can chat with people while the chat log is visible on the TV screen.

CP: How do you see MMS taking off in India? Are the charges on the higher side?

SKG: I personally believe that MMS will be very popular in the long run, but not as a messaging service. It will be used as a content and application delivery medium. More than price, the current barriers to better adoption of MMS are lack of interoperability among networks, interoperability problems among handsets and limited penetration of MMS capable handsets. However, all these are standard problems faced by any new emerging technology. I am confident that most of those will be resolved in next one to two years.

Contact:
ACL Wireless Ltd.
Tel: +91-11-2643-8813/16
Fax: +91-11-2643-8825
Email: info@acl_wireless.com
www.acl-wireless.com

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