Next Generation Services Now Telescope

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Innovation Drive

George Bevir, Deputy Editor, CommsMEA

With operators facing ever tougher competition and falling ARPU, Serif Beykoz, Telenity's general manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, tells CommsMEA how operators can boost revenues by offering next generation services.

COMMSMEA: HOW DID TELENITY DEVELOP AS A COMPANY, AND HOW IS THE COMPANY DEVELOPING IN THE REGION?

Serif Beykoz: Telenity was established in 2001 in the US, and after that it came to Turkey and acquired a company called Telsoft. Telenity invested in Telsoft and enlarged the engineering team and devised a new roadmap for value added service platforms and applications.

Since then, over the last six or seven years, we have been generating and producing our own platforms serving wireline and wireless operators and we are developing VAS applications and platforms for them. We have four main offices, with headquarters in the US, and offices in Turkey, India and Dubai. We have several enlargements planned, the first one of which is in the United Arab Emirates. We have opened a Dubai office to serve the area better; we have several operations in the region and supporting them from the Dubai office will be much easier and faster.

COMMSMEA: WHAT ARE THE MAIN BUSINESS AREAS THAT TELENITY IS INVOLVED IN?

Serif Beykoz: We have three main business lines in Telenity. The first one is the messaging group, providing very stable messaging platforms. The second group is the service delivery platform (SDP) and the location group, and the third business line is value added service applications, like “Canvas PayForMe™”, which is a call collect application for mobile subscribers. We have another product, “Canvas SmartConnect™”, which is a personalized call management service which helps operators realize new revenue streams by effectively managing call termination.

We are one of the ten biggest SDP companies in the world. We have contributed a lot to one of the largest Turkish operators, for whom we provided the main part of their SDP two years ago and it is running very well. Since then, we have enhanced our solution and made a slight improvement to our SDP. We have provided SDP solutions to Nawras with a tier two solution. We have provided similar SDP solutions for tier two and tier three operators, and we can also contribute a lot to tier one solutions.

All our solutions are based on the “Canvas®” platform. Canvas provides 60% of the functionality of applications, including distribution, fault management, statistics, error handling and database management. So whenever you want to create a new application, you don’t have to worry redeveloping these functionalities.

30 Countries, 35 Operators, 300 Million Subscribers

COMMSMEA: IN WHICH OTHER COUNTRIES CAN TELENITY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES BE FOUND?

Serif Beykoz: We are now in 30 countries serving over 35 operators globally. In the Middle East, we are working with Etisalat, and in Oman with Nawras. We are also providing solutions in Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia where we work with both Mobily and STC. Also, we are working very closely with Zain Group; they have 22 different operations and six or seven of them are working with us at the moment.  So we are quite powerful in the region and with the Dubai office I think this should be reinforced giving better post-sales support.  

In the other regions like Americas, we are working with operators in Mexico, and planning to expand in Brazil and other emerging countries in South America. In India and emerging South Asian countries, we are working with leading mobile operators, including the top three operators Airtel, BSNL and Idea Cellular, the fastest growing telecom market in the world, 

We are supporting all kinds of standards, that is very important for us. We are not producing just for one country but for the world. We are supporting all the communication and IT standards.
There is a lot being said about convergence and we are ready for this mobile convergence; telecommunication and IT services are coming together and we are ready for it.

COMMSMEA: WHICH SERVICES ARE MOST POPULAR, AND WHAT ARE OPERATORS’ ASKING FOR?

Serif Beykoz: The main one is Canvas PayForMe, it’s very popular. Canvas PayForMe, Mobile Collect Call Service, allows wireless subscribers to easily initiate mobile reverse charge calls without the involvement of an operator - through a simple USSD message followed by the target MSISDN, an SMS message or a call - which makes the service available even while roaming. It works like this: If I don’t have any credits left, I still can call you, and you pay for the call. For example, when I call you, the sysytem sends you a message asking whether you want to accept a collect call from me. If you don’t want to accept the call, you just select no, and hang up. If you accept the call, we get connected and you will be charged for the duration of the call. It’s very popular in the Middle East and Africa region.

ARPU decline is a very big problem for all operators and they still get their main part of ARPU from voice. What we can do is stop the decline with targeted value added services. This is the main differentiator for operators, even for 3G operators. For 3G, the main service is data plus video. We can provide 3G services like video services  and we have four or five of them already (e.g. video mail, video ringback tones, etc.).

In crisis times operators prefer to work with us to stop the decline of ARPU. For instance, our very stable SMS system creates 10% of the overall revenue in many operators. And we have deployed over 15 SMSCs worldwide, so we can claim that we are generating 3.5% or 4% of all SMS traffic through our system. It's very stable and very future wise, it is a very economical solution.

We also see increasing popularity of location-based services, mobile marketing and mobile payment services. The most important LBS services are buddy-finder, navigation, tracking and local search.  We have had increased demand for our Canvas PFS, Location-based People Finder Service especially in India and South Asian countries.

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