Mobile Networks Featured Article

 

 

BS: Over the years, Roamware has raised the bar in delivering solutions that make a difference in the technology landscape while leading to enhanced value for its customers. Innovation is driven by strong R&D talent targeted at addressing business and end user experience issues. Well known products by Roamware that provide seamless roaming service including Roaming Replicator and Traffic Redirection, Roaming Quality Management facilitate:

 

 

Today, we enable telecom operators with applications that help gather roaming intelligence, manage behavioral targeting of subscribers, and also prevent roaming frauds. In some countries, telcos are also providing futuristic services based on our platform such as Free Local Number, which allows telecom operators to provide inbound roaming subscribers with free local country numbers so they can receive calls and SMS free of cost on that local number in the visited destination where the service is offered. It also benefits telecom operators as it helps retain in-roamers within their network in that country too. Similarly, MultiSIM is another such latest technology which allows users to access the same mobile number on two separate devices, say, a primary mobile phone and a secondary car phone or a data device.

 

The next revolution in the industry we envisage is the introduction of roaming is hubs. Roamware was the first to create a hubbing solution with its innovative Roaming Replicator solution way back in 2002. With increasing pressure to manage capital expenditures and to increase revenue and profits, hubbing provides an on demand like service for operators in extending roaming relationships and rolling out revenue increasing roaming solutions without having to make upfront capital investments. To tap this opportunity, Roamware recently announced the launch of its roaming hub solution, Roamware Meta Hub. These hubs are in partnership with leading mobile carriers globally.

 

 

BS: We believe that in order to stay ahead, companies need to stay focused on industry business issues and end user experience and support it with continued of innovation. Our continuous and cutting-edge thought-leadership has resulted in a broad suite of innovative solutions that are benefiting telcos and subscribers alike. Roamware has pioneered offerings in Traffic Management, Roaming and Network Infrastructure, Virtual Home Environment. The prolific innovation behavior has resulted in Roamware filing over 210 patents globally, of which 23 have been granted. I would say we are one of the few companies across the world that has institutionalized innovation, and this has paid rich dividends to us and the industry at large.

 

 

BS: Our market is truly global with our presence spread across 146 countries. In our view the world is truly flat, and we built a business that is truly global in a short span of 8 years. We see significant opportunities in our existing customer base itself, to cross-sell and up-sell our services. For e.g. in India, we have a 100 percent penetration but we still see significant opportunities as our customers grow and expand and we bring new offerings for them within and outside the roaming space.

 

 

BS: The Roamware – Sun Microsystems partnership is a global partnership and dates back to 2002 when we chose to build our platform and solutions on Sun hardware.

The Roamware-Sun partnership has facilitated us to provide robust and efficient telco grade solutions and to comprehensively test and benchmark our solutions before they reach the customers. The partnership prides itself as bringing together two companies which have an extremely deep penetration across global markets market and handle millions of roaming calls In India where Roamware enjoys a 100 percent penetration in established GSM operators in India. The joint partnership processes more than 80 percent of India’s international roaming traffic - providing seamless roaming solutions to most of the country’s leading mobile service operators.

To better understand the workings for the partnership, I would use the example of our ‘Roaming Replicator’ solution. This helps our clients leverage the strong roaming relationship and existing roaming infrastructure of other operator(s) to provide seamless coverage and accessibility to international roaming calls of their subscribers. To support these solutions, Sun offers Chip Multi threading based servers, which are high on performance and highly cost efficient at the same time, along with the deployment of Sun Storage 2540 to deliver reliability, flexibility and high-density.

 

 

BS: We recently acquired a leading mobile financial services company and are now the global market leaders in that segment too. We believe that the mobile financial services industry is highly lucrative. The market opportunity is immense. Less than a fifth of the global population has access to traditional structured banking services, while mobile services are available to over four billion subscribers. This represents a huge opportunity for Roamware to exploit their 400-plus mobile operator networks customer relationships across 146 countries to become the leader in the provision of Mobile Financial Services, and help realize the ambition of banking the unbanked. With proven solutions deployed at mobile operators, financial institutions and service providers globally, Roamware’s solutions offer compelling value and differentiation to key stakeholders in the ecosystem.

 

Our vision in making foray mobile financial services is beyond the obvious business and commercial opportunity this space presents. . We see a huge potential to enable financial inclusion by serving the huge rural population globally that is largely unbanked or under-banked. It includes people who have to today travel 40 miles to collect their pensions; or an ailing old woman who is earnestly waiting for the money order to arrive in a remote village so she can see a doctor; or a farmer who cannot avail a loan because he does not have a bank account. These are people with meager income sources and micro-financing through mobile applications can work wonders for them. For this, we have partnered with Grameen Bank, and have set up a dedicated developer team.

 

 

BS: Since its inception in 2001, Roamware business has consistently grown through every calamity the world has witnessed including terrorism, economic downturn, global pandemics and wars. The challenge for us has always been to create value for our customers and to focus on business challenges and end user service experience. Our journey has shown that if one can deliver tangible value and revenue for customers, they would make the investments irrespective of the political and economic climate.