'Reach, Cost Make SMS Effective For Enterprise Communication In India'

ValueFirst empowers its customers to communicate among varied IT back-end systems and mobile phones using SMS services. Vishwadeep Bajaj, CEO, ValueFirst, talks to Biztech2 about how SMS has evolved as an enterprise communication tool, the nuances of the Indian market and the company’s plans to become a part of the emerging UC scenario.

Can you shed some light on your business model and how it functions?

As a company, we are an enterprise messaging company and our client base is primarily corporate. Essentially, we provide our clients with a platform to send SMSes, which integrates with their IT set-up. For example, whenever you withdraw money from an ATM of a bank having a core banking solution deployed, you immediately get a text alert informing you about the transaction details. This actually happens when the bank itself sends us a message informing us about the transaction, which we receive at our servers hosted in server farms. These servers are in turn connected to various mobile operators. So whenever there is a message from the bank, we, in partnership with the concerned mobile operator, deliver it to the designated mobile phone. Our solution is deployed at the customer’s end (in this case at the bank’s end) and we don’t host anything on our end.

Our application is also being increasingly used for internal communication particularly by managers and top executives, who want to remain in touch with their teams across the country.

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Moving on, just like the bank can use our application to keep the end customer updated, the end user can also use it to communicate with the service provider. For example, if you want to know your bank balance, you can send a request to a number defined by the bank, which is provided by us. At our end, the operator recognises the request and relays it to our servers. We, in turn, send this to the application running at the bank’s end, process the query and send the response back to the consumer. This is a typical scenario of how a simple query gets processed using mobile banking and what our role in it is.

There are two parts to it – one is the ‘Push’ from the corporate to the consumer and the other is the ‘Pull’ from the consumer, which essentially is a query.

How do you think SMS as a communication medium is important in an enterprise/ SMB environment?

When we started out five years ago, we used to pitch to enterprises how and why SMS can be used for business communication. Over time, the market has grown so much that we are no longer asked this question by our clients.

Market adoption of SMS has happened in a phenomenal manner in the last couple of years, due to various factors like reach and cost. In a country like ours, where Internet and fixed-line telephony connectivity is still poor, the cell phone is a device, which is almost omnipresent and enterprises can use it effectively to reach their target audiences. To explain the cost factor, let me give you an example. An insurance company used to earlier send out reminders using paper mails. The total cost used to come around Rs 7 per policy holder. Now, the same alerts can be sent for just about 15 paise per policy holder using SMS as a medium. So cost savings are huge.

Does ValueFirst have different products for the SME and the large business segment?

We make products for different market segments on the basis of their requirements. Typically, large corporates want products, which are highly scalable and which offer secure messaging. For instance, a large bank would be very particular about the security of the messages being sent out and also about how the data is being maintained in the servers. So we have created products, which have the highest levels of encryption for such clients.

Our products targeted at the large enterprise and corporate segment are obviously high on features and pricing. In case of SMEs, they don’t require integration with the back-end, but this is applicable when it comes to products meant for enterprises. So there is a difference in these aspects related to the offerings.

What are your views on Unified Communications (UC) and where do you see your products fitting into the UC net?

As a company, we are rapidly progressing towards developing a multi-modal platform, which will allows our enterprise customers to communicate with consumers using e-mail, SMS, Internet (both mobile and otherwise) and voice. As the number of mobile subscribers in the country increases every month, we notice that they are not as tech-savvy as we are. They find it hard even to write a simple text message. For such markets, voice is a platform, which can be exploited to the maximum and where products can be developed, for example, voice SMS, voice broadcast etc.

We are also in the process of developing version 2.0 of our platform, which supports multiple levels of interactions through different protocols using different communication technologies. As an industry, we are slowly moving towards a Unified Messaging Platform where enterprises will be able to choose the messaging medium at their own will depending on the time of the day. For example, if they want to communicate at night, they would preferably use e-mail over SMS.

We have already integrated our SMS platform with voice and by the next quarter, we’ll be adding e-mail and Internet to it.

What are some of the future applications/ innovations that can be expected from ValueFirst?

I think location-based services will play a critical role in the times to come as many enterprises now want to target the consumer based on his/ her location and as this promises to be a high-growth area, we would be pursuing it actively.

In voice, you can create apps, which can track you and also work as a safety tool, something which is being used by the BPO sector currently.

As consumerism is increasingly gaining a foothold in India due to a boom in the organised retail sector, this sector is again going to use location-based services (LBS) to track their deliveries.

Also, in the near future we will see machine-to-machine apps being developed. In layman terms this means, perhaps you may be able to control your appliances using SMS. However, these won’t be mass-scale products and wouldn’t be ARPU-driven either. They would primarily be made for convenience. LBS, nonetheless, can be significant even in terms of ARPU (average revenue per user) and we’ll be following it keenly.