Nokia all set to overwhelm India with Ovi

GOA, INDIA: In its bid to move from being a product-centric company to a consumer- centric organization, Finland-based handset major Nokia is all set to overwhelm India with Ovi – the company’s Internet-based services initiative.

Initially Ovi will have three flavors of music, gaming and navigation attached to it.

“Ovi will open the door to Nokia’s Internet services. We are looking at giving a unified user interface for mobile, PC and online media. India has close to 40 million Internet users and we are moving towards the 250-million mobile subscriber mark. With Ovi we will try and bring the power of Internet to the a greater scale,” explained Vineet Taneja, Head of Go to Market, India, Sales, Nokia India.

Ovi, meaning 'door' in Finnish, enables end consumers to access their social network, communities and content, as well as acting as a gateway into Nokia’s services segment.

With the company committing itself towards the services front, segments like gaming and navigation will hold key towards the success of these services.

“Ovi means a lot of things packed into one. However, to start with in India, it would be music, games and navigation. We already have N-Gage, which is integrated as part of Ovi. We would be launching the gaming part in India in the next three months. Users can share games seamlessly with this. Music is another focus for us. Nokia Music store has more than two million songs on the web. With Ovi these can be accessed via PC or mobile. As far as navigation is concerned, we have Nokia Maps where we are covering close to 150 countries. Within India we have already covered eight cities so far and moving forward we would be adding more to this,” he added.

Explaining the importance of Ovi, Taneja said that Ovi holds the key for moving from web 2.0 to web next generation (NG).

“These are just some of the applications and capabilities that we would be launching in India initially, as the market accepts it and as we grow, we would be focusing a lot towards delivering solutions for our end consumers,” he added.

Competition with SPs?

Asked about Nokia entering into the domain of a service provider with Ovi, Taneja said that Nokia will continue to work with service providers very closely and Ovi will be an open-ended initiative in every respect.

“This is surely going to add value to a service provider. So we would be looking at partnering with all the service providers on this and move towards mutually beneficial partnerships in this direction. And it is an open-ended initiative so we are open to supporting even other handset brands with this,” Taneja added.

Answering to a similar question from an operator standpoint, Sanjay Kapoor, President – Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel said that Airtel would work with Nokia on Ovi.

“We have a great partnership with Nokia and it is a very important one for us as well as for Nokia. So we would surely be taking this partnership further and work on Ovi as well. The end customer will be the sole beneficiary from such an initiative,” he added.