Mobile has empowered businesses and consumers alike. Thanks to the ease of use and convenience of mobile, not only it helped enterprises to create new levels of efficiency within the organization, but also emerged as a powerful channel for them to engage the consumers as well.
Joe DiFonzo, chief technology officer, Syniverse tells how the company can help in simplifying the business and technical complexities of mobile communications and help businesses to deliver more personalized mobile experiences based on location and contextual awareness.
CIOL: How crucial is the India market for you from the business expansion perspective?
Joe DiFonzo: Mobile is evolving very fast, which is forcing the businesses invest in solutions to meet the customers’ requirements. We are trying to make the mobile communication process simple, secure and seamless for the users. We have global network to connect the telecom operators and provide the last mile solutions to them.
Being one of the world’s large as well as among the most dynamic mobile markets, India is a crucial growth market for us. As the services move from 2G to 3G and eventually to 4G, we see a lot of growing opportunity and challenges for the operators to address the market, which create increasing service opportunity for us as well. More than 70 operators and enterprises in India rely on Syniverse for a variety of solutions, which is also a reason that we have the second largest presence in India. We have one-third of our total employee base in India.
CIOL: What kind of services do you see emerging in the operators' space?
JD: Besides various data roaming services, we provide reporting and intelligence services to operators which help them to monitor the subscribers' location, tariff and usage pattern and monetize those information to generate additional roaming revenue as well.
There are areas where operators can provide value for to their customers and that helps them to cement the relationships with lots of other business too.
A lot of that awareness can be shared with other businesses if you choose or allow it to be shared and help them to deliver better services to the customers. For example, it can help in preventing credit card frauds, provide suggestion, advertisement and alert based services to the users.
CIOL: Syniverse has started focusing a lot on the non operator business recently. What kind of growth opportunity do you see in that space?
JD: Our business with non operator customers is growing significantly over the last few years. Our collaboration with the operators helps us to connect a lot of business to the mobile ecosystem through various services.
One of the fundamental services is global messaging capability, which enables businesses to communicate to their customers and employees, no matter which part of the world they are in. Messaging constitutes 10 percent of our global revenue today and we anticipate a considerable uptick in our entire enterprises services businesses, where we offer a lot more besides global messaging.
CIOL: How do you align your resources in India with these growth objectives?
JD: Enterprise segment is 15 percent of our total revenue strength today and we are looking to grow it to 50 percent. We have many customers in India from the banking, retail, travel and hospitality sectors who are contributing to this growth considerably.
Out of our total global workforce of around 2,700 people, we have delegated 300 people completely to our enterprise business. Some of the those staffs are working here in India as well. We have created collaboration capabilities here for our engineers, making it possible for them to work in parallel with the engineers in the US and Europe. This helps us to build solutions faster for the global markets.