Yavox, Siemens unveil mobile message platform

Brazilian mobile systems integrator Yavox and the local arm of Siemens Business Services have built a new platform for exchanging mobile phone messages, called Plataforma SX, company executives said. Yavox has invested 6mn reais (US$2mn) in the platform to date, providing the link between customers and their partners or suppliers using mobile phone messaging, either SMS, MMS, video streaming or video download. The company's network operation center is in São Paulo with outlets across Brazil. Siemens has worked as a strategic partner on the project from the very beginning, starting with projects for Orbitall and Visanet, Yavox president Andreas Blazoudakis told BNamericas in a written response to questions. For the latest platform the partners decided on joint ownership, with Yavox contributing its experience with technical and business specifications for the platform, while Siemens' expertise is its software and related development teams in Curitiba, Recife and São Paulo. The partners are in the process of migrating 50 customers to Plataforma SX, adding that most of the company's customers are from the financial and media markets. The platform can handle mobiles, pagers, or PDAs, and has features such as converting text into voice messages for delivery to fixed lines, Blazoudakis said. The partners' existing customers are Rede Globo, Visanet and TAM. The partners are also holding high hopes for exporting the new platform to other countries, said Luiz Claudio Guerra, of the project management unit at Siemens Business Services. Yavox was created in 2000 and has so far connected 1,300 operators across 143 countries, and over the last three years, its network traffic has grown around 500% a year. International connectivity is not widely used at the moment, Blazoudakis said, adding that the only significant customer is Brazilian oil company Petrobras, which bought a significant volume of international messaging under a tender which Yavox won in December 2003. Yavox has incorporated a number of outside applications such as Ntime's Quiz and Portuguesa Link's Chat program. The number of text messages, or SMS, sent in the first quarter was three times higher than all of 2003, and should reach 300 million this year, according to the companies. SMS in Brazil was starting to gain ground in 2002 but slumped during 2003 due to the significant number of mergers and acquisitions, and general restructuring of the sector, during the year, he said. Now the market is more organized, the SMS market has started to grow fast again, primarily in services related to banks and television stations.