Drivers have a relaxed attitude to personal safety as they hurtle past donkeys, carts and roadside scenes echoing recent unrest, and my current taxi driver tells me the best way to stay safe on these roads is to play the Koran through the tapedeck.

We’re both praying in different directions, but we get the result we’re hoping for, safe arrival at the Smart Village Business Park, outside Gisa in the shadow of the pyramids.

A counter-point to the ancient surroundings, this is a vibrant hub of high-tech innovation, built to accommodate major multinational and indigenous companies working in Telecommunications and Information Technologies others.

Spacious green areas, waterfalls, artificial lakes and business community leisure areas form a unique backdrop to iconic office buildings. It’s like a modern oasis that looks like it would be more at home in California’s Silicon Valley than an Egyptian desert. Worth remembering that Egyptians have a reputation for innovation with modern engineers still unsure how the great Pyramids were built!
The steady growing number of national and multinational enterprises moving or seeking to move to Smart Village Cairo underlines the business park’s reputation for providing an environment that supports competitiveness, productivity and profitability.

But, it’s the high calibre and ambition of the mostly youthful people that is most awe-inspiring. The Vodafone headquarters, for example, is populated with young 20-30 year olds that are driving its next wave of cutting-edge solutions.

Education is highly valued in Egypt and large companies are capitalising on the highly qualified talent pool and university partnerships to train people in the areas where the world needs skills. These aren’t back office support roles that young Egyptians are fulfilling. It’s high end software development that will make or break future successes.

There is a tangible desire and commitment here from aspiring and ambitious youths to grasp any opportunity for progression. Education offers a clear route from poverty towards a lucrative future.

The thing is, Northern Ireland has the ability and opportunities to far exceed what Egypt is achieving, but we need to do more to transform, inspire and energise new talent. Thankfully organisations like Northern Ireland Science Park (NISP) are taking proactive steps to identify and develop a lasting relationship with our brightest before, during and after they leave.

The Generation Innovation programme, for example, holds two annual events to identify some of NI’s most promising pupils and invite them and their parents into regular high value events. The next one takes place in November and I’m excited to proud that my daughter is among the students who were nominated by their school to meet 40 highly successful innovators in local science and technology companies like SLA Mobile.

Success is earned by going further and learning again and again. We need to shift mindsets towards proactivity. In Israel, for example, students are brought together and told they are special and have a role to play in making the economy successful. Our students must be given similar direction and encouragement if we are to compete at the best of our ability.

In SLA Mobile we work with a lot of nationalities and the capability of Northern Ireland talent rates highly amongst the world’s best. It always strikes me how similar New Zealand people are to those back home, but the big difference is the motivation to work overseas, build experience and get going. Working in London or Dublin is regarded as a daunting experience to some at home, but in New Zealand travelling to Australia; Kuala Lumpur; Indonesia and Europe are common work routes.

If the dusty roads of Egypt can lead to international innovation-led business, then so too can the well travelled highways of Northern Ireland. We just need to give our next generation of economic navigators a better roadmap and the confidence to choose the route to success.

But with Direct Operator Billing things are about to change…meaning that operators can rapidly build new merchant relationships and high volume, secure mCommerce channels.

The mobile payment opportunity is great.  Smart Mobile devices are becoming pervasive – across all demographic groups.  Moreover, in many developing economies mobile payment represents a significant opportunity to create new platforms for secure monetary transactions.

At SLA Mobile, we believe the mobile payment potential is still largely untapped – because we believe that the future of mobile payment embraces the most obvious means of exchange with a secure and trusted party – the mobile phone service provider.  And we’re working with operators to allow them to build richer, revenue-generating opportunities with their own customers.

Direct Operator Billing – for goods and services via the subscriber’s own mobile bill – is still in its infancy.  But many believe (and we agree with them) it’s an idea whose time has come.

Until recently the only services consumed by subscribers that were billed directly to the mobile phone bill were ring tones or wallpapers – with payment via Premium SMS.  Direct Operator Billing, however, allows a myriad of goods and services to be billed directly to the mobile subscriber’s bill.  With the emergence of near-field communications functionality and QR code readers on mobile devices traditional high street goods and services can also be purchased in this way – safely, securely and with vastly better customer, operator and merchant related business processes.

This is part of a briefing paper we have prepared on Direct Operator Billing.  To get a copy of the full paper, click here.  

This is a fundament shift in how we interact with the world around us from keeping in touch, to buying pizza or sharing documents. The four companies driving the overall technology revolution are arguably the world’s biggest brands Google, Facebook, Amazon and of course Apple – which recently became the most valuable company in the US. Note that I’d don’t list Micrsosoft! And in five years time don’t be surprised of two on the list are actually Chinese companies.

It’s no surprise that all four are competing for your wallets but central to their strategies are the devices we keep next to them, our mobile phones. In the last two weeks Google actually bought Motorola’s mobile phone division. Put that in context – Motorola invented the world’s first mobile phone. Across the globe, customers are hungry for the next wave of clever gadgets, apps and services and that demand has given the big firms pole position in the international mobile market.

Mobile Network operators, formerly the powerhouse in the sector, face a genuine threat to their role. In fact, some industry analysts claim they could become extinct or reduced to a utility provider role within five years as companies like Apple and Google steal a march on their customer relationships.

The ongoing tussle is rapidly up scaling technologies and services for customers and giving Northern Ireland firms an opportunity to play their part on the global stage.

At SLA Mobile, for example, our strategy is global in focus but local in implementation. Our offices in Belfast and Kuala Lumpur have helped us clinch contracts with network operators – from the USA to Australia, South Africa and China – as they look to fight back by unlocking the potential of their network assets and identify innovative revenue streams

We aren’t developing applications ourselves, but instead offer a platform, Alacrity, that allows telecoms operators, such as Vodafone, to easily link up with application developers in any country. This means organisations can reach and bill any end user on any network without having to enter into multiple arrangements with network operators in each jurisdiction they work in.

It’s a simple concept, but with big potential. Ultimately it means that services and applications can hit the market faster, development costs are massively reduced and combine handset, mobile and social networking data into clever new ideas.

Working across multiple countries and time zones, new technologies have also been critical to help us reduce costs and keep our projects on track. Cloud computing has been making waves in recent months, but it’s a concept that were quick to adopt over the last two years.

With information stored virtually in ‘military specification’ servers and accessed through mobile and web-based applications, such as Google Docs or Microsoft 365, the approach allows our teams in Belfast and KL to simultaneously access and collaborate on documents improving our business efficiency and saving our clients money.

And for any NI director reading this article sit up now. Ask your IT Manager about Cloud Computing and its ability to save you 50-80% on your IT costs. There is a revolution going on with Cloud.

Just a few years ago it would have seemed inconceivable that projects would be stored remotely rather than on a local server. Today it’s the other way around. Cloud computing makes it easier to establish connections between sites and speed up project delivery.

The world is definitely becoming a smaller place and we’re all seeing farther as a result.

At the recent “Managing Devices, Applications and Services” conference organised by the Device Management Forum in Maidenhead, U.K., a number of discussions and presentations addressed a wide range of aspects within M2M and the Internet of Things – such as standardisation, information provenance, consumer applications, e/m health and drivers behind M2M and IoT.

Adding a fresh and innovative message to the field, Philip Stanfield, Director of Vodafone Business at SLA Mobile, captured the attention of the international audience present with the “Smart Enablers: Quicker route to market” presentation. This presentation outlined three simple messages:

- there is an opportunity for all when operators unlock their network assets
- there is an opportunity to monetise Direct Operator Billing now
- this can be done at 2.0 speeds and not old world telco pace

These opportunities were here and now, and with three simple yet effective illustrations and a detailed case study from Vodafone Ireland, SLA Mobile’s Alacrity solution demonstrated the benefits and innovation that could be achieved when looking to enrich M2M and enterprise applications.

Attended by partners of the wider M2M ecosystem, including such international companies as Ericsson IPX, Samsung, Numerex, Vodafone and KPN, the growth and development of M2M is certainly set to continue its impact on consumer and enterprise agendas in the coming years.

Craig Richards

Craig Richards, previously Director Asia Pacific, is to take on a new role at SLA Mobile – driving forward the company’s global engineering and operations function.  With the appointment of Jonathan Ng as Director responsible for APAC, Craig will become Director of Operations & Engineering.  He will continue to be based in Kuala Lumpur – the centre of excellence for SLA Mobile’s operations and engineering delivery team.

Commenting on Craig’s new role, Nic Stirk, SLA Mobile’s CEO says, “Craig is a level-headed, business focussed technologist, who has consistently delivered projects to some of the world’s leading mobile operators.  While Craig will continue to work closely with Vodafone, in particular, in APAC and Middle East regions, his new role will focus more on building SLA Mobile’s platforms and products for future growth.”

According to Craig he’s looking forward to the new challenge.  “With our Alacrity enablement platform SLA Mobile is well positioned to support mobile operators building a mobile future where more and more enhanced mobile services are delivered via the cloud.  We have an exciting story to tell in that space and I’m looking forward to building compelling solutions on the back of our highly extensible Alacrity platform.”

Related articles

• Alacrity Enables Network Operators to Build the Mobile Future (slamobileblog.com)
• Jonathan Ng joins SLA Mobile as Director for AP region (slamobileblog.com)
• Top 20 Mobile Operators in World – Bharti 5th in subscribers, but 17th on revenue! (trak.in)

Social networks represent the next wave opportunity for mobile services

Craig Richards of SLA Mobile argues why Alacrity plays a critical role in enabling the mobile future

It’s clear that the mobile market is expanding and changing at a remarkable pace.   Increasingly, mobility is the driving force behind cloud computing.   Cloud-based resources – such as social media, media sharing, and search engines – are, more and more, being accessed from mobile devices rather than traditional desktops.  The estimates vary but it’s probably fair to say that about 50% of Facebook ‘interactions’ are via mobile devices.   And a significant industry has sprung up – app stores, mobile advertising and location-specific sales promotion – around the pervasive consumer mobile phenomenon.  Soon a similar phenomenon will hit the enterprise too.

However, network operators are often being left behind in the scramble to create the ‘new mobility’.  So-called over-the-top (OTT) players such as Google and Apple are winning the publicity war (and lucrative customer relationships). Network customers often have much deeper and richer relationships with the big app stores or social media sites than the underlying network providers.

This doesn’t have to be the case.  Operators have the opportunity to take advantage of their customer relationships and network assets to build new hybrid propositions that engage customers – right at the heart of the social networks that are the driving force of consumer interaction and connectivity.   That’s why we see the emergence of a new type of mobility that also embraces the richness of the mobile network itself.

Our Alacrity platform enables three categories of customer focused solution – utilizing core network assets.  These hybrid solutions deliver rich, revenue-enhancing customer experience focused on mobile commerce (enabled by direct operator billing), customer loyalty & sales promotion.  But the key thing is that the services are delivered right within Facebook or other social media sites.  But this is just the start.  Over time operators will also want to support the development of M2M cloud applications, enterprise applications and other services – and Alacrity will provide a supportive and enabling platform for future growth on public cloud networks (such as Facebook) as well as virtual private clouds.

Alacrity allows innovative propositions to be developed in-house or via external aggregators and partners – and achieves this through what we call enablers:

• Direct operator billing and m-Commerce
• Extensions to social network assets
• Mobile and fixed APIs
• Revenue settlement
• Customer analytics
• Application Developer On-Boarding

The SLA Mobile Alacrity platform has been utilised by a leading operator here in the Asia Pacific region to allow value added services to be promoted and shared among Facebook users.

The operator’s Facebook application, based on a social shopfront application framework, delivers a Caller Tones solution as a fresh channel to subscribers.   It turned a ‘Fan page’ environment into a revenue earning service.   The fan page allowed subscribers to engage with and provision mobile services – from within their favourite social media environment.  Similarly, a European tier one carrier wanted to create a partner ecosystem that would drive e-commerce activity – expanding the use of their often underutilized network capabilities.   SLA Mobile worked to “on-board” a series of partner aggregators to integrate new mobile network APIs into their development plans.   The result is a host of new cutting-edge ‘mobile cloud’ services enabled by an active community of developers.   Moreover, the operator now has a clear opportunity to develop new service propositions that take further advantage of the mobile web and underlying network assets.

Craig Richards is Director of Operations & Engineering at SLA Mobile

Jonathan Ng

Based in Kuala Lumpur, Jonathan Ng will lead sales, business development and marketing activities for SLA Mobile in Asia Pacific.  He has some fifteen years of senior business development experience in the telecommunications industry, covering all domains from fixed to mobile to enterprise business.

Commenting on Jonathan’s appointment, Nic Stirk, CEO of SLA Mobile commented, “Jonathan is a great addition to the team especially now that we’re really developing our market presence in the APAC region on the back of Alacrity – our key enabler of mobile and social network solutions across the global mobile industry.  Jonathan’s experience across all facets of the mobile industry will help us position Alacrity as the enabler of choice in the region.”

According to Jonathan, the opportunities for SLA Mobile in the region look very positive.  “It’s clear that operators now face a significant challenge in terms of maintaining customer relationships and revenue.  Over the last two years the over-the-top players have challenged every aspect of the operators’ business model and time to market of services – and are diluting the relationship that operators have with their customers.  However, the most progressive operators are sensing that there are opportunities in the market as well – leveraging the emerging social channel, offering new, richer services and offering merchant services that take advantage of the trust that mobile customers have invested in their service providers.  I’m confident that we have a compelling story to tell operators in the region.”

Jonathan started his career in the telecommunications industry working with a mobile operator before moving across to work with several major integrators and software vendors.  His regional responsibilities have focused on VAS infrastructure, service delivery platforms, specialised telecom software/systems and FMC applications.

The Deloitte Best Managed Companies Awards Programme, in association with Irish Life Corporate Business, recognises indigenous Irish companies across the island of Ireland which are operating at the highest levels of business performance.

The independent judging panel, chaired by Denis Brosnan, reviewed a broad range of criteria including strategy, capability, commitment, financials and growth potential across all key functions of the business. This year, the judging panel also focussed on how companies were planning growth in their organisations in a sustainable way.

Commenting on the winners of the Deloitte Best Managed Companies Awards Programme, Pat Cullen, Managing Partner, Deloitte and judging panel member said: “Despite the negative sentiment that currently prevails, the Best Managed Companies Awards Programme shows that Irish indigenous companies are a cornerstone of growth in the Irish economy and can and will play an important role in Ireland’s overall recovery. For proof of this, you need look no further than this year’s winners.”

Damian Fadden, Director, Irish Life Corporate Business, and fellow judging panel member said: “Irish Life Corporate Business is delighted to support the Deloitte Best Managed Companies initiative. Ireland’s economic recovery can benefit hugely from the contribution made by its indigenous business sector, and this initiative helps companies in that sector to showcase their success and to benefit from expert mentoring to help them move to the next level. Our staff have met many of the participating companies and have been very impressed with their innovation and determination – on behalf of Irish Life Corporate Business I would like to wish all the companies every success in 2011 and beyond.”

The Deloitte Best Managed Companies Awards Programme is open to companies from all 32 counties on the island of Ireland. It is the only awards programme that considers a business’ performance from every perspective. Details of entry for the 2012 Awards will be issued in the coming weeks on www.deloittebestmanaged.ie.

The ’Best Managed’ designation is an important marketing tool for the winning companies – but, perhaps most importantly, the awards provide a reason to celebrate the efforts of the entire company.

About Deloitte Best Managed Companies Awards

The Deloitte Best Managed Companies programme, in association with Irish Life Corporate Business, promotes and recognises excellence in Irish owned and managed companies. It is the only awards scheme on the island of Ireland that considers a business’ performance from every perspective. Entrants to the programme will compete for this designation in a rigorous and independent process that evaluates the calibre of their management abilities and practices.

Programme sponsors are Irish Life Corporate Business, the Irish Management Institute and the Sunday Business Post.

For further information, visit www.deloittebestmanaged.ie

This morning Vittorio Calao, Vodafone’s Group CEO, announced the company’s results for the first half of the fiscal year along with a strategy update that laid out their future plans. As anticipated by the financial markets, results exceeded expectations with revenue increasing 3.9% over the same period last year. Continuing a familiar trend, data revenue increased by 25.9% and now delivers 11.7% of revenue, or £1,243M. This is up significantly from 9.5% of revenue in the same quarter last year. Growth on a geographical basis continues to come from Africa and Central Europe (20.1%) and Asia & Middle East (22.2%).

This growth has been fuelled by the increased usage of smart phones and other mobile data devices. Vodafone has also seen increased interest in broader data-based services like payments via handsets and an initial wave of mobile devices for homes and cars. In emerging economies revenue growth is still driven by increasing penetration of mobile devices. Data take up is low, but demand for basic Internet access is high, and to a large extent can only be satisfied by mobile networks.

With quarter-over-quarter mobile data growth of over 20% it is no surprise that this area features heavily in Vodafone’s future strategy. In fact it is Number 1 on the company’s 5-point growth strategy and consists of four elements:

• Continuing to invest in network expansion, not only in Europe but also in India and Africa.
• Moving to tiered data pricing plans and differentiated service levels, thereby giving customers more control and encouraging adoption.
• Enhancing customer care, retail presence, online services and support, to ensure that customers get the best data experience.
• Carrying a balanced portfolio of smart phones and connected devices to accelerate further smartphone penetration.

Like most large companies, Vodafone relies on a number of partners in order to achieve their strategic objectives. For these partners it is imperative that they have a firm grasp of the issues facing Vodafone. And for Vodafone, the customer experience and growing data usage are paramount.

In the wireless industry talk about embedded/connected devices, and the associated M2M communications they require, is a hot topic of conversation. Estimates of the number of connected devices the world will see in the coming years is truly mind boggling, and are actually so large as to lose relevance. Kind of like the amount of money required to bailout a bank, how am I supposed to internalize a number with more than nine zeros behind it?

Compounding the problem is the fact that, unlike bank bailouts, a tidal wave of embedded devices has yet to materialize. In the US the three largest wireless carriers announced their respective embedded device connections for the first time for 2Q10 (http://bit.ly/aMY026). In 3Q10 AT&T came in first place with 8.5 million connections. Verizon was in second place with 7.9 million connections. Sprint did not report this figure for 3Q10, but took the third spot with around 1.9 million connections in 2Q10.(Interestingly,Sprint has pointed out that ARPU for connected devices is significantly lower than for traditional subscriptions, but the cost is also significantly lower, resulting in higher margins.)

A recent blog post by David Pringle goes a long way toward explaining the disconnect between forecasts and reality (http://bit.ly/dBIyVV). As he deftly points out, the basic infrastructure currently in place is adequate to facilitate the anticipated explosion in connected devices. But there are two obstacles that stand in the way. The first is cross-border compatibility, “The way the telecoms market is structured and regulated, on a nation-by-nation basis, means some of these embedded solutions could be difficult to implement in some markets and the industry could struggle to scale.”

The second issue is trust. The data generated by billions of devices has the potential to create both positive and negative effects on society. Without the proper safeguards in place, adoption by both businesses and consumers will be limited.

These barriers highlight the need for connected device platforms that enable easy on-boarding and device management and, importantly, have the flexibility to allow seamless cross-boarded connectivity. At the same time carriers need to educate consumers and regulators on how this information will be used, and how it will be protected.