OnMobile first to enter mobile tech business in India
Chandramouli Janakiraman, a former associate VP and head of the Internet products group at Infosys, has start up IT company in Silicon Valley in his own venture. Mouli Raman, now co-owns OnMobile, India’s largest VAS (value added services) and data solutions provider for mobile and media companies. Raman along with his partner Arvind Rao, now CEO of OnMobile, decided to start a company.
OnMobile was was incubated by Infosys in 2000, and was the first to enter the business in India in this segment. OnMobile got its first order from mobile services provider Orange in Mumbai (which was later re-christened Hutch and then Vodafone). The first product that we sold was caller tunes. After VAS was a hit with Orange, Airtel soon followed. “Our second breakthrough was Airtel. And after we received this order we were confident that it was the turnaround of our company “, Raman said.
The company soon developed technology for many VAS products like caller tunes, cricket updates, mobile ticketing, commodity exchange updates, astrology updates and several others. The total VAS market in India is pegged to be around Rs 3,000 crore, of which a third comes from OnMobile’s technology, claims Raman. OnMobile has brands like Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson and Huawei as clients for its ring tones services, while the company has also provided media portals and interactive TV programming for Star, ESPN, MTV, Channel V and Yahoo.
The company recently also acquired a French data products company Voxmobili. This has further strengthened the product portfolio with additions of products like Phone Backup & Mobile Paparazzi. These are presently deployed with a number of international customers like Orange, Cingular-AT&T, France Telecom, T-Mobile, Wanadoo, and Turkcell. The company, headquartered in Bangalore, has its R&D centre here as well, along with offices in Singapore, Paris and Jakarta. Presently the company employs over 1,000 people over the world and clocks Rs 130 crore in annual turnover. Raman said that presently there is no global VAS provider and they are aiming to become the first global player in VAS, within a couple of years.
Tags: Airtel, Infosys, OnMobile, VAS provider