Add value, on the go

Mobile Value-Added Services or MVAS for enterprises offer anytime out-of-office connectivity, availability of business information round the clock, and lots more. By KTP Radhika

Mobility is the catch phrase for the Indian enterprise today. Fueling this growth would be a combination of factors including innovation, entrepreneurial and startup activity, better penetration of devices and increased spends on mobile applications and middleware. Further, the growing trend of remote- and mobile -workforce demands anytime out-of-office connectivity and availability of business information round the clock. Companies are resorting to Enterprise Mobile Value-Added Services (MVAS) to satisfy this need.

With the advent of MVAS in the enterprise, mobile executives can now work faster and more efficiently. According to Naveen Chopra, Director –Vodafone Business Services, the availability of high-speed networks is enabling enterprises to roll out mobile solutions to all stakeholders in the value chain. “Today, smart mobile devices have more computing power and higher storage capacity than ever before. With an all-pervasive network, enterprise applications will work better and faster on these devices,” he said.

The market potential
Enterprise MVAS consists of basic services such as enterprise email, instant messaging and high-end services such as sales force automation, supply inventory management, analytics, location-based services and specific industry-based applications. Compared to consumer MVAS industry, the enterprise MVAS ecosystem is a fledgling affair now. Even then, it’s a decent number. According to industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), India’s enterprise MVAS space constitutes about 15% of the Rs 26,000 crore (2012) MVAS industry. A recent study conducted by IAMAI and Indian Market Research Bureau said that affordable mobile devices and low-cost data subscriptions would push the MVAS market in India to Rs 33,280 crore by 2013. The penetration of enterprise VAS in India is still low when compared to western countries. However, India is witnessing steady growth on this front.

“Enterprise mobility is rapidly increasing, powering the growth in the enterprise MVAS sector,” said Joby Babu, Head-Operations, Nimbuzz. “India’s enterprise VAS industry has started growing rapidly in the past 18 months. Currently, the growth is at such a rapid pace that it could even surpass the consumer MVAS industry in coming years,” he added.

That said, this growth is expected more in the high-end part of enterprise MVAS. Najib Khan, CMO, Airtel Business, explained, “Today, almost 80% of Indian enterprises have mobile-enabled their email services. However, only 15% of enterprises have adopted high-end services such as Sales Force Automation and Supply Chain and Inventory Management. Therefore, the industry is expecting a lot of growth in high-end MVAS.”

Sunil Lalvani, Director, Enterprise Sales, Research In Motion (RIM) India, felt that the key drivers for MVAS had been application adoption, employee collaboration tools, unified communications, business intelligence (BI) dashboards, sales force and field force automation tools. “In the case of several Indian companies, there has been a sharp increase in the adoption rate over the past twelve months. Companies are deploying business-to-business, business-to-consumers, and even business-to-employee applications,” he said. This has led vendors and operators to invest more in this segment. Several of them are also coming out with applications that appeal to this segment on a priority list.

Hari Shankar Goud, Delivery Head, IT Solutions, Prithvi Information Solutions, said, “With vendors focusing on innovative solutions such as mobile marketing, direct-to-consumer services and enterprise applications, this segment of the VAS industry is moving steadily towards profitability.”

According to him, with India emerging as one of the largest players in the telecom space, there would be humongous growth potential for enterprise MVAS. Even global companies have leveraged their Indian operations to become a Center of Excellence (CoE) for enterprise MVAS deployment.

“Successful apps deployed in India are replicated at worldwide operations. In this regard, BlackBerry has partnered with many MNCs,” revealed RIM’s Lalvani. Also, the era of VAS being limited to voice-mail and SMS has come to an end. We are now entering the age of VAS 2.0, which is data-driven and data-intensive.

Technologies in action
The advent of 3G and 4G has also played a big role in the evolution of enterprise MVAS. The roll out of 3G and 4G services in India will enable enterprises with enhanced levels of connectivity. Technologies such as 3G and 4G (LTE) also offer superior voice, video quality and a wide range of data, email and multimedia services. According to Udit Shanker, CEO, TeleDNA Communications, the key challenges in enterprise mobility are “network issues and data speeds.” He explained, “Some applications such as video streaming and e-commerce are heavily dependent on data speed. 3G and 4G will augment application capabilities by providing speeds equaling broadband Internet.”

Further, enterprise applications such as augmented reality will benefit from 3G and 4G networks since it requires real-time processing of data. Prithvi’s Goud felt that the launch of 3G and 4G in the Indian market would help foment the adoption of a wide variety of data services, mobile Internet, location-based services, m-commerce and app stores.

“With 3G and 4G as the infrastructure backbone, we expect to see a lot of innovation occurring in the enterprise VAS space,” he added. Apart from this, messaging-based applications will also play an important role in driving the growth of the MVAS industry.

According to Mouli Raman, Managing Director, OnMobile, these applications would not only consume less bandwidth but they would also be used as the primary application in retail or by business users.

The enterprise mobility market represents a diverse ecosystem of different players. Hence, they need to synergize across the value chain to offer enterprises a one-stop-shop for mobility needs. For this, Cloud-based collaboration services will help. They will provide fast, scalable and consistent user experience across multiple mobile platforms. Nimbuzz’s Babu said, “Cloud computing will be an integral part of most of the new VAS applications. Many of these solutions need to have centralized processing requirements. Cloud computing is the optimal solution for such systems.”

Telcos are offering various services such as email, ERP, CRM and mobile security on the Cloud, which can be accessed using mobile platforms. Another technology that will foster the next level of growth in the MVAS sector is that of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication. Khan of Airtel said, “We have forayed into M2M applications, which are the next wave in the enterprise MVAS segment. This technology is growing rapidly.”

Valued-added benefits
With BYOD catching on thanks to the widespread adoption of smartphones and other mobile devices in the corporate segment, the core objective of CIOs center around how to leverage these to drive business benefits. Enterprises use MVAS for a variety of reasons. Improved productivity, increased customer responsiveness and better efficiency are some of them. MVAS also provide companies with quantifiable benefits such as enhanced employee productivity, collaborative vendor-partner management and they also enable quicker and better decision-making in all key areas.

Corporates who have been early adopters of MVAS have started seeing the benefits of adopting the same. Chopra of Vodafone said, “Mobile applications for the sales force improve productivity through real-time access to price information, stock availability and so on, by eliminating the need for the workforce to travel to the office at the end of day. Services such as location tracking enable enterprises to manage their supply chain more efficiently and help improve operational efficiency through real-time visibility into location and movement of assets.” Value-added SMS and voice-based services help enterprises improve responsiveness to customers and give them access to a wider set of customers at lower costs. MVAS will also help companies drastically cut costs and make mobile platforms more accessible to customers, thereby boosting sales.

Better connectivity is another advantage. Raman of OnMobile said, “MVAS can provide an organization’s enterprise applications with additional channels to connect better with its employees, suppliers, distributors and customers. Therefore, enterprise VAS applications that automate the business processes of enterprises can boost productivity and ease with which business transactions are conducted.”

Nitin Dang, Country General Manager, Micro Focus, India and SAARC, explained, “Today, MVAS are taking businesses into a new battleground where functionality and performance drive fierce competition amongst different brands and offer a great opportunity for brand differentiation. Companies need to ensure that they are able to deliver access to business applications round the clock, withstand high amounts of traffic at peak periods, as well as be able to work to a higher standard.”

Vendors provide solutions across various channels including SMS, GPRS, USSD, voice and video. “Short-code services for enabling end-customer transactions through mobile applications, caller tunes, etc. are the services that are most frequently used by enterprises,” said Chopra.

“Through our ecosystem of over 30,000 developers in India, BlackBerry now offers customized solutions for virtually all industry segments and it also deploys horizontal applications such as executive dashboards for field force utility,” said RIM’s Lalvani.

Khan of Airtel added, “Airtel has developed an ecosystem for enterprise MVAS as a part of the business. Our Mobile Application Tool for Enterprise (MATE) was announced three years ago. This helps companies develop and integrate enterprise applications such as SAP, ERP, CRM on smartphones and facilitate field forces to cut costs, increase efficiency and improve decision-making.”

Manufacturing, BFSI, FMCG and retail all make use of MVAS today. Supply chain in manufacturing and retail are the sectors that are expected to adopt MVAS in a big way. Industry experts said that the education sector would see widespread adoption of MVAS soon as would the government sector.

Challenges and prognosis
Despite the enormous potential that it holds, the enterprise MVAS segment is not free from its fair share of challenges. Security is among the biggest here. The loss of endpoint devices might lead to a situation where the internal information of the company is compromised. “An enterprise’s data would be at risk if an employee’s mobile device is lost. Therefore, before adopting MVAS, security solutions should be clearly addressed,” said Tarun Singhal, Director of Communications Service Provider, India and SAARC, CA Technologies. There is also the lack of infrastructure to meet the high demands of this segment. The low penetration of these services in rural areas also poses a challenge. Experts felt that the non-availability of an ecosystem that could help nurture innovation in enterprise VAS also had to be dealt with. According to TeleDNA’s Shanker, the lack of business-centric mobile applications as well as the back-end integration of applications were the other key challenges that had to be addressed. In the case of full functionality applications, manageability is also becoming a hurdle, he said.

Despite that, most players are optimistic. Application maturity is rising from the current dash-boards to complete back-end integration. Several operators have started working towards recovering the investment by developing apps to provide the “right stuff to the right person at the right time”. They are also looking at the right monetization model for apps. Industry trends suggested that the declining cost of mobility along with innovative business models would enable smaller companies to join the MVAS bandwagon as well. Also, the lucrative growth potential of this segment has prompted several vendors to invest in R&D, innovation and for creating cutting-edge products and services.

It seems that Indian enterprises have all the reasons to keep mobility as their catchword for this season.