Infrastructure deals indicate cellcos’ willingness to continue investing in messaging

Posted by Pamela Clark-Dickson Thursday, March 12th, 2009

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There may have been fewer attendees at Mobile World Congress this year, but from the point of view of the economic health of the telecoms sector, that may not necessarily have been a bad thing. In the downturn, companies are focusing on reducing their extraneous costs which means that they could justify sending to MWC only those of their employees who would be able to generate the most value from attending. Little wonder then, that a consensus is emerging that there were fewer tyre-kickers at this year’s show, but that there was still a reasonable amount of business being done.

The number of deals announced during MWC would seem to indicate that the mobile messaging industry, in particular, is in a pretty healthy state. Companies in the sector announced deals with about 30 mobile operators representing all regions, but with a skew toward Africa. All types of messaging infrastructure were represented at MWC, but four key areas stood out: SMS and MMS, e-mail, IM and mobile financial services (including mobile banking and mobile money transfer).

Microsoft probably made the most significant announcements at MWC in terms of the messaging market; in addition to presenting the MyPhone Cloud service, the Windows Marketplace application store and Windows Mobile 6.5, it unveiled deals with mobile operators Telefonica and Orascom for Windows Live applications, including e-mail and IM.

These are deals with significant geographic reach. The win with Telefonica, which is the extension of a strategic alliance, will see Windows Live for Mobile clients preinstalled and downloaded onto devices across the cellco’s Latin American footprint; under the Orascom Telecom deal, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger will be rolled out on Orascom opcos’ devices in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

Messaging-infrastructure heavyweights Acision and Comverse also announced operator wins in the days leading up to and during MWC. Acision revealed that US cellco Sprint Nextel had made a large-scale deployment of its messaging infrastructure last year; it also announced deals with 3 in Austria and Australia. And Comverse’s recent cellco customer wins include SingTel and Angola’s Unitel. Anam was another messaging-infrastructure provider announcing multiple customer wins at MWC, though it did not name the mobile operators concerned.

The Comverse stand was busy when this reporter visited, and I was politely asked to move aside from a demonstration of Comverse’s social address book to an enthusiastic group of executives who might have been from a Japanese carrier. This was interesting phenomenon to observe, particularly since Japan’s cellcos are considered to be world leaders in developing mobile communications services. Comverse is a member of the GSM Association’s Rich Communication Services initiative, and its prototype social address book looks to be very much in the spirit of RCS.

It looks as if France will be the first market in which RCS will go live, with Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom, in the summer. The RCS Technology Group completed interoperability testing in January, enlisting 14 companies to test RCS services including enhanced address book, content sharing and enhanced messaging, on eight handset types.

A number of RCS-based or RCS-like clients are either in development or have already launched, including clients from the aforementioned Comverse as well as Movial, Globo and mobile IM vendor Miyowa. One of the overriding themes of MWC’s messaging offer this year was the number of clients being shown that will enable mobile subscribers to aggregate all their messaging – SMS, MMS, e-mail, IM and social networks – into a single inbox, with or without presence and synchronization between the mobile and the PC (or Cloud).

In the mobile e-mail sector, e-mail providers Visto and Seven both announced that they have ported their respective platforms to the Google OS. Seven also provided some statistics on the volume of mobile e-mail traffic traveling over its platform, which is possibly the first time this kind of data has been made publicly available. The hope is that other companies will be encouraged to adopt similar transparency for their mobile e-mail services.