ACL Wireless gets aggressive in Asian market by Shipra Arora
Express Computer, July 15, 2002

About nine months into the launch of its wireless instant messenger (WIM), wireless solutions company ACL Wireless is charting out a new growth path with the expansion of the product into the Asian and European markets.

According to Sanjay Goyal, CEO, ACL Wireless, after having gained a sizeable share in the Indian market with customers like AirTel, Spice and Idea Cellular, next on the company's agenda is to make its presence felt on a global level. The company has already struck deals with two cellular operators in the Asian market, including Thailand-based AIS and Exelcomindo in Indonesia

The operators will be ready to provide the WIM service by mid-July this year. With this, the company targets to up its subscriber base from the current 1.25 million to 10.85 million subscribers. AIS itself will provide more than 7 million of this subscriber base. Though declining to give out the names, Goyal said the company is in talks and on the verge of finalising deals with another 10 cellular operators across Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia and Hong Kong. In order to tap the European market effectively, (next in line on ACL's global business plans) the company will be setting up its sales and marketing office in the United Kingdom in the next two months.

On the domestic front, the company recently bagged an order from Escotel, where it is in the final stages of implementation. The WIM service is expected to be up and running on Escotel's network in the next 15 days. In addition to this, ACL is also in talks to extend the solution to all the circles of AirTel and Idea Cellular. The company has tied up with AirTel for the Delhi circle and Idea Cellular for the Andhra Pradesh circle. According to Goyal, deals have almost been finalised and it is only logical for the operators to extend services to all circles. The implementation will be rolled out over the next 3-4 months and is expected to provide a far deeper penetration to the company in the domestic wireless market.

ACL has also initiated the development of the enterprise version of WIM, which will be available in the market by the second quarter of 2003. The company is now working towards adding new enhanced features like location technology and integration of multimedia messaging into its existing WIM solution.

Location technology involves searching for people based on location or knowing the location of the people one is chatting with, over the WIM service. "However, there are certain issues involved, as the operators' infrastructure in the country is not yet ready to support these services. But the company will be ready with these enhanced features so that the operators can integrate them into their services as and when they decide to do so," Goyal explained. The company has raised $1 million through venture capital, to be utilised towards funding these development activities over the next one year.

The WIM provides features similar to Yahoo and MSN Messenger, which allows for chatting with known user groups like friends and colleagues. The solution is independent of WAP, SMS and PC, thereby allowing for real-time cross domain messaging exchanging messages between SMS, WAP and the Internet. The messages can be exchanged real-time from mobile phone to mobile phone, mobile phone to PC and from PC to mobile phone. ACL offers its WIM solution both on an ASP as well as a licensing model and the company has already hit a mark of one million messages per month on its existing deployments.