eServGlobal gives telcos access to 650m social networkers

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 10 February 2009 00:59

IT Industry - Market

eServGlobal (ASX: ESV) has launched "a revolutionary social relationship manager (SRM) software," that joins mobile telephone networks with popular Internet social networking sites.

According to eServGlobal, the software - which is compatible with most popular social networking sites - allows telco operators to launch value added mobile services which provide incentive to their subscribers who choose to share their personal profile information. eServGlobal says that, between them the top 10 social networking sites have some 650 million users.

eServGlobal chairman, Ian Buddery, told ITWire "The phone companies are really struggling with social networks and they're being left behind. If you talk to 18,19 and 20 year olds not a day goes by without them being on Facebook, whereas five years ago they would have been on the phone to their friends, now they are on Facebook and this is creating serious revenue erosion for telcos...Today you can get a 3G phone with a browser and log on to Facebook and do all your social networking and all the mobile phone company is doing is providing access to the Internet. They are not adding any value."

Buddery said that SRM represented "a way to get phone companies into the Facebook business that nobody had thought of before." He explained: "Our SRM allows the subscriber to very easily upload their Facebook contacts into a repository in the mobile network or vice versa: to download their phone contacts into Facebook.

"This means that the mobile phone becomes an extension of Facebook, and because the phone company now has access to those connections it can analyse them and then try and get the subscriber to help it recruit those contacts, by offering the subscriber some rewards. It helps the operator build a more loyal subscriber base and build very large networks of friends within their subscriber network."

eServGlobal will demonstrate SRM at the GSM Congress in Barcelona next week and Buddery was confident of early sales. "SRM has been designed to operate on other intelligent network platforms. We can offer it to a customer who has, for example, an Ericsson IN platform rather than pushing our own IN platform and that is a different mode of deployment for this type of software. It means much less capital cost, much less disruption to the network and much faster time to market. There is no reason why and mobile operator cannot deploy SRM and start capturing revenue form some of those 650 million social network subscribers in a matter of weeks."