‘Social Media Messaging is Evolving Beyond What We Can Imagine Right Now’

1. Please tell us about your business?

We provide social messaging service to 500 enterprises in India such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Facebook and also political organisations such as Indian Youth Congress. This service helps these organisations connect with their customers, employees, affiliates, partners and members through daily exchange of messages, notifications, alerts, etc. Our entire network is used to send 2.1 billion messages a month and we proudly control about 50% of the unified messaging market at present. We entered the Indian market in 2009 in the consumer space but later on shifted focus to enterprise space seeing the near invincible presence of Whatsapp and other such social messaging platforms. We are now helping these organisations engage with customers in more meaningful and interactive ways considering there are 60 million smartphones as of now. In addition, we help them send out messages to the remaining mobile phone owners through SMS, WAP, etc. 12-15% of India's SMS traffic flow through our network.

2. Since your focus is on messaging through smartphones, how does the current emphasis on BYOD affect/promote your business?

In the US, most organisations allow their employees to bring their own device to work without any contravention to their prevail security laws and this is pretty much the way forward. In India, we still have organisations that believe in locking their employees to company-owned devices but the scenario is changing and going forward we'll see more and more organisations embracing BYOD.

3. With a lot of devices talking to each other these days, aka IoT, how effective is your solution for such networks?

We have a solution that measures footfalls of customers in a big retail outlet by identifying them through their smartphones. likewise on a manufacturing floor their are several devices that need to share data with each other through the use of sensors. All these data is fed into our systems and relayed across to the right customers as information. We have Whatsapp like app for enterprises, an IoT app that let you analyse and use data for sales, production and managing customers.

4. What is going to be the size of this market, say two years from now.

Already we see 45% of data being searched through Google, around 65% of data being shared through Facebook, and so on. The role played by mobile apps is going to be huge, especially with mobile app development becoming easier, and more and more students and amateurs getting into developing apps for the different platforms. The general body meetings of Youth Congress are organised through our platform with 5 million members actively connecting to each other. The India Against Corruption Movement saw 8-9 million member interacting through social media messaging. We have already delivered 30-40 million messages through Facebook. So the potential is huge and shall only grow in future.