It’s all about services

BANGALORE: July Systems, a two year old organization working on products and solutions that help mobile operators and other wireless service providers meet complex challenges in the wireless sector, expects deployment of its product in the first quarter of 2004-05.

"The solution, July Meta-Service System(JMSS) 1.6 version, has been undergoing customer trials since April this year. We have concentrated on the major markets for this trial process including Korea, Australia, Taiwan and Europe among others," said July Systems Co-founder and President, Rajesh Reddy. He also explained that though they produced regular upgrades to the platform, 1.6 was the first version to go on trial. The next version to start trailing recently has been JMSS 1.8.

The company is also in the process of expanding its staff. According to Reddy, the company plans to hire at least 17 people in the middle and senior level and a similar number for various other positions at the earliest. The company, which is presently 65 people, has around 50 people in Bangalore.

Founded by Ashok Narasimhan and Reddy of Unimobile fame, the organization focuses on creating solutions that will help mobile operators in providing more services seamlessly amidst changing technology, richer media content and an increasing complexity in interactions between the various players involved. The solutions aim to integrate the service and business model of the operator with other parties involved, like content providers and sponsors, thereby making it much easier to integrate complex services.

"This is not just telecom business anymore. This is a business of services and systems that provides a 360 degree uninterrupted view of everything from payment to gateway to actual rich data," said Reddy. He added that July is the only player in the market who is building a platform that is not vertical specific and pointed out that the company’s solution did away with the cost of investing in infrastructure vertical by vertical.

The company, though incorporated in the US, houses its engineering, product management and product marketing divisions in Bangalore. "After all this is the center of the Earth, now just three and a half hours from both Europe and Japan. We are right in the middle of the action," added Reddy.

Replying to a question on the pricing for the product, Reddy said, "we work on three models — horizontal platform licensing, vertical offerings based on the platform and managed or hosted outsourced offerings. Pricing will depend on what services the customer chooses."

The company is funded jointly by NeoCarta Ventures, WestBridge Capital, Acer Technology Ventures and Jumpstartup to the score of $8 million with $5.5 million being awarded in April 2002 and an additional $2.5 million following in August 2002 for extension of the company’s range.

CyberMedia News Service