Brazilians Choose Smart Kiwi Messaging
A trip to Brazil as part of a New Zealand Trade & Enterprise mission earlier this month has paid off big time for Auckland mobile messaging developer Bulletin Wireless which is about to sign with four of the country's carriers.
After demonstrating Smart Messaging Application Centre (SMAC) platform and Bulletin Mail at the annual TeleExpo in Sao Paulo, the company was asked by several carriers to put together seperate business cases.
As a result, company director and President Bruce Herbert says four separate deals look to be signed off in the first two weeks of April that could generate "in excess of US$50 million over the next three years."
He says Bulletin Wireless has been asked to faciliate the international messaging requirements for the carriers, using its patented two-way global communications technology.
The company is working with Brazil Telecom; CTBC, based in Bairro and Telemig Cellular in Sao Paulo. Nextel Brazil, intends to deploy the technology in Brazil and for corporate customers in Chile, Argentina and Mexico.
The SMAC platform will enable instant mobile email, email to SMS communication, MMS and include middleware and API tools to wirelessly enable virtually any corporate data. The system is geared to send and receive short messages (SMS) or multimedia messages (MMS) from an email client to a cell phone or any other text capable mobile device.
Individual users simply provisioned online and load the client software on their PC or laptop to send txt messages. The carriers will also get access to a customised web-based SMS application.
After completing the development and re-branding, gateway services will initially be operated from Bulletin Wireless' data centre in Auckland using a web-based ASP (application service provider) model.
Bulletin Wireless will revenue share on every message that goes through its gateway as well as undertaking significant integration work. "We bring the components together for each deployment, change the language to Portuguese and customise the look and feel of the web site to suite the client. Then we deploy onto their hardware and integrate into their billing engines."
Mr Herbert says there are about 12 significant mobile carriers in Brazil vying for a slice of the 70 million mobile users market. The only way to add value is through applications and services. "We're carrier agnostic. We don't have to worry about interconnection agreements or hand-off costs because we are a global service provider partnering with Vodafone NZ and UK, Orange UK, T-Mobile, Synerverse and others to carry traffic across multiple GSM and CDMA networks."
The Brazilian carriers will resell the service through their corporate sales channels. "It's a new revenue stream for them. They already have billing relationships with corporate cellular clients so it is seen as client retention tool to retain clients while potentially increasing 'churn' from competitor networks and improving the average revenue per user."
Mr Herbert says while the New Zealand market is already mature, the Brazilian corporate mobile market is tipped to grow 100 per cent this year and business applications are just starting to take off. "They're about 4-years behind us," he says."
Posted to the site on 22nd March 2005
