By Nic Stirk, CEO

Next month sees the third anniversary of SLA Mobile’s business in the fast growing Asia Pacific market. With an office that overlooks the Petronas Towers, and with the leadership of our APAC Director Craig Richards, our Malaysian business is fast approaching fifty world class engineers – and growing month on month.

The engineering team consists of Consultants, Software Developers, Quality Assurance & Test specialists, System Integrators as well as 24×7 Operations teams, all focussed on the growing Mobile Data, Internet and VAS spaces. Our teams are delivering projects in New Zealand, Australia, Qatar, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as for our SLA Mobile business in EMEA.

Back in 2006, when looking at where to centre our APAC operations, Malaysia offered a number of compelling reasons;

1. It has an excellent education system, which has turned out a talented resource pool,
2. The resource costs are significantly lower than the UK and other European economies, and
3. For some resource profiles the costs are lower than India!

However one of the most compelling reasons was its Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) initiative.

MSC is the Malaysian government’s FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) initiative which encourages overseas technology and ICT companies to base their Asia Pacific operations in the country. Over 2,000 ICT companies have applied and been granted MSC status, including global leaders such as Sun, and Cisco.

Being awarded MSC status brings with it a number of advantages, including; access to world-class physical and communications infrastructure, and 0% Corporation Tax for the first 5 years of operation, with the opportunity to extend that for a further 5 years.

SLA Mobile applied for MSC status http://www.mscmalaysia.my/ in 2006 and after being awarded we formed Stirk Lamont (MSC) Sdn Bhd in 2007.

The projects our team are delivering from Kuala Lumpur are bringing real value to all our customers. They vary in scale and geography and have included one-off engagements or large scale work packages for global Mobile Network Operators requiring all elements of our business, through to managed service contracts for media companies who want to access markets that they do not currently service.

An early win included a significant System Integration project in ’06 and ’07 for a major New Zealand mobile operator. This 12 month engagement touched all elements of our business and involved the upgrade of our customers Service Delivery Platform – a project that was completed on-brief, on-budget and on-time.

In 2008 we were awarded a major Software Development project that utilised consultants from both our EMEA and APAC businesses in a single coherent team, a model that allowed us to compete, and win, against much larger competitors not just on quality but on price. The SLA Mobile ‘hybrid’ model used agile methodologies and completed the 10 month development project with fantastic reviews from all customer stakeholders.

The success and growth of our business in APAC over the past three years has validated our decision to invest in Malaysia. As well as the skills and technology knowledge, our team continues to demonstrate tremendously the values and attitude which provide us with a fantastic foundation to continue bringing real benefit for all our customers both within the APAC and EMEA markets. Here’s to the next three years…

The explosive growth of Mobile Data continues. And this report by Ericsson reports what is perhaps a key moment – in December 2009 data traffic exceeded voice traffic. In the past twenty years Mobile and the Internet have on a global scale transformed how we all live and work. Now the convergence of the two markets into the Mobile Internet takes us into a new era. Google have signalled their intent to dominate this space with their Mobile First Mantra. But don’t write off Mobile Operators such as Vodafone who have the ambition and intent to own the minds and wallets of consumers world-wide. Watch this space ..”

Philip Stanfield .. Commercial Director

http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/article/ericsson-mobile-data-has-overtaken-voice

Three of the senior team from SLA Mobile will be attending the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona from Monday February 15th.

If you would like to schedule time to meet with Nic Stirk (CEO) or Philip Stanfield (Head of EMEA Sales) please complete our meeting request form and we’ll do our utmost to accommodate you. 

We find that the Mobile World Congress – given its size – can be daunting.  Often the best means of getting most from the event is to have as many useful meetings as possible set up in advance.  We hope you agree.

So, if you’d like to work with us, partner with us, find out more about or solutions, or just need to get the inside track on our video to mobile, mobile advertising or content management solutions, just go ahead and complete the form.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE SLA MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS MEETING REQUEST FORM >>

SLA Mobile, has announced a new video to mobile solution specially designed for mobile operators and video content owners.

SLA Mobile, recently ranked by Deloitte as one of the top 10 fastest growing technology companies in the United Kingdom, has entered into a strategic partnership with New Zealand company Abdeus – which has developed a suite of enterprise proven video and media solutions.

SLA Mobile already has a relationship with Fox Mobile, a division of news corporation, and provides rich content to mobile subscribers across Asia.

Abdeus’ media delivery suite provides end-to-end content management and delivery – from content owner, to service provider to consumer. SLA Mobile ensures seamless integration between the Abdeus solution and the service providers’ service delivery platforms and content owners’ programming. The Abdeus suite incorporates the streaming platform and media server, a full CMS solution, video encoding and service level monitoring. SLA ensures integration into rating and charging engines, provisioning and BSS/OSS.

The combined SLA/Abdeus solution is a proven, scaleable, enterprise solution that supports live streaming and video on demand. All the main video formats are supported – MPEG4, Quicktime etc. – as well as the main video and audio compression protocols. All known 3G handsets are supported – including iPhone and Blackberry – and digital rights management (DRM) is integrated into the stream and download platform.

Download: Mobile to Video Overview

According to Philip Stanfield, SLA Mobile’s Head of Sales in EMEA:

“The benefits to be gained by operators and content owners alike in offering live streamed programming and video on demand to mobile devices are clear. They can achieve significant incremental revenue, and extended customer base, and recurring subscription based relationships across multiple channels.

“By working with SLA Mobile operators and content owners have the assurance of working with a proven high growth integrator and best of breed media delivery suite platform.”

SOA and “The Cloud” are all the rage at the moment. Putting your data online is old news. Now it is all about putting your business logic online. Architects are envisioning platforms where developers can interact with a business to help find synergies and better connect with customers. Ultimately, this can lead to the discovery of new markets.

For telco’s stakes are even higher. New markets would just be icing on the cake. The real motivator is to give people access to a rich, compelling platform – which can be monetized through data line rentals. Handsets have the potential to be the next great wave for computing and having a stake in controlling that platform could be very lucrative.

People new to SOA wonder what the problem is. Why is it so hard to put your business logic online? Can’t you just run your code through Apache Axis and be done with it? Well, sure – if you don’t have legacy systems. Or you have different systems serving the same function for different departments. Or you are concerned about granular data access security. Or you release new versions of your software and are concerned about compatibility with other systems. Or you want to expose your API’s in a uniform way. If these problems sound simple – then you probably haven’t given them enough thought.

Unfortunately, most of these problems are found exclusively in large organizations. A startup competitor who does everything through that slick new LAMP <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)> app is going to have an easier time of putting their business logic online then incumbents. Companies with complex systems need a clear strategy around how they want to share their systems with partners.

And here we have a problem.

The fact is there is nothing off-the-shelf which is going to dramatically improve your chances of success with such a complex endeavour. Sure, some vendors sell products which are helpful. But the concept of “The Cloud” is evolving at such a rapid rate that currently the only way to keep up is with a custom solution. It takes thought and hard work – no way around it.

There are some very promising solutions on the horizon. One solution to watch is Microsoft’s “Oslo <http://www.microsoft.com/soa/products/oslo.aspx> “. Olso represents a huge investment from Microsoft to create a generic solution to solve this problem. Of course there are two issues with silver bullets like this: First, they imply vendor lock-in. Second, it can take years before they are fit for production.

In the mean-time, the Cloud is coming. Without question, 5-10 years from now your partners will be creating mashups <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)> and programming against loosely coupled APIs supplied by a seemingly random collection of partners. If they are not using your APIs, then they will be using someone else’s. The competition is on.

It’s a great accolade when one of the world’s top media companies selects you as a partner.

Fox Mobile Distribution has chosen SLA Mobile to provide the managed service that will bring shows like ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘24’ to the mobile devices of millions of customers in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

“The deal includes ringtones, wall papers and screensavers, as well as enabling Fox to put smarter mobile advertising across a range of sites,” said Nic Stirk, SLA Mobile CEO (pictured, right).

“Such a vote of confidence for SLA Mobile confirms our place at the top table of mobile companies in the world.”