Risks and Rewards in High-Growth Emerging Markets

How Effortel Does It

Effortel is a mobile virtual network enabler/operator headquartered in Belgium. They currently support clients of various sizes in Western and Eastern Europe, Taiwan and Brazil. Smaller clients are usually new to the telco service market or have limited experience with service provider functions. Larger clients are often well-versed in their specific markets and industries, but may be experiencing growth or scalability issues. By leveraging technologies and providing a modular and flexible structure, Effortel delivers a faster time-to-market for client services and promotions. These factors, in turn, give Effortel the ability to enable its clients to focus on creating, rather than waiting for, new and valuable services.

Recently, one of Effortel's clients wished to run a promotional campaign that involved giving away free minutes to customers of a certain European supermarket chain. “Their idea was to give away free minutes when buying certain categories of products,” said Liudvikas Andriulis, chief marketing officer for Effortel. “They had the idea on Monday, and we launched it by Friday. With the platform that we're using, we can think, design and deploy at the speed of a retailer.”

Amdocs enabled Effortel to provide robust mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE) services to other MVNOs. “We are both MVNO and MVNE, which is important to our MVNE customers,” said Andriulis. “They know we use our own services too, and that we built the infrastructure for ourselves and our global partner. This is the best reliability guarantee.”

Conclusions and Future Considerations

Effortel's example demonstrates how time-to-market, low total cost of ownership and flexibility are major factors for achieving profitable services from customers and clients in high-growth emerging markets. In environments where planning and service implementation can occur in less than a week, having the right strategies and the right partnerships will be the critical factor between paying the price of failure and profitably surviving risks. Otherwise, by the time service providers are prepared to reach the Air Rush, there will be fewer new subscribers to mine.

Patrick McGrory is president of the Central America and Latin America and Network Business Unit of Amdocs.

Related Articles:

WiMAX Gains In Emerging Markets

Tata Consultancy Reshapes Strategy for Emerging Markets

A Snapshot of 3G, OSS Opportunity In Africa