hSenid Mobile gears up for great opportunities

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

In recognition of their multiplying successes in international markets, multinational telco-mobile software solutions company hSenid Mobile was bestowed the honour of being titled the winner of the prestigious Red Herring 100 award this year.

The award highlights the exciting start-ups from the Asian, European and North American business spheres and in the past has been the first to recognise companies such as Google, Skype, Netscape and YouTube.

Although several Sri Lankan companies have won the regional Red Herring Asia 100 Award previously, as hSenid Mobile did in 2009, hSenid is so far the only company to have won the global award and was handpicked from a pool of 1,200 companies worldwide. CEO of hSenid Mobile Dinesh Saparamadu expressed his delight at this achievement and expressed his views on how this would impact the both the company and the country, growing opportunities in Sri Lanka and their plans for the future.

Following are excerpts from the interview:

Q: How has winning the Red Herring Award impacted the company?

A: With this we now see a lot of visibility; what happens is it gives us what is called visibility into the venture capital market – from an industry standpoint, venture capital is what is lacking in Sri Lanka for IT companies to grow. When you look at companies like Facebook, Twitter or any company that has done well, they are companies that were funded by venture capital when they were at the growth stage. So these kinds of achievements give visibility and since winning the award, we have actually had about four to five offers from US venture capitalists interested in funding us.

Q: What criteria are required to win the award?

A: The award looks out for innovative companies that come with innovative ideas and also looks at things like growth, how the company has grown in that past couple of years; they look at both innovation and the potential for that in the market. Some of the companies that have won the award in the previous years have been Google, Skype and so on and while we are not saying that we are going to be one of those companies, what the award does is, it recognises you as one of the leading innovative companies in this space.

We are in the mobile application area in which I would say we have a bright future with the kind of work that we are doing. We actually won the Asian Red Herring 100 two years ago and since then, the Red Herring team had been following our progress and they recommended that we apply for the global award as they felt we had a good chance.

Q: Could you tell me more about the work hSenid Mobile specialises in?

A: hSenid mobile specialises in mobile applications. We currently deal with 80% exports and only 20% of our operations are here in Sri Lanka. Some of our customers include companies in Singapore, Indonesia, Latin America – one of our customers is the one of the largest operators in Indonesia with a subscriber base of over 90 million subscribers which is almost five times the Sri Lankan population and they are currently running our systems. We build very high scalable systems that can run at the operator environment.

Two months back, we launched the world’s first Telco app store in Barcelona which is like the Apple app store and focuses on emerging markets. The software is one of our latest products and is for emerging markets and we launched it to operators so that they could in turn provide the app store experience for their consumers and it has so far received a fantastic response. It has been launched in Sri Lanka through Etisalat and the response has been very good so far.

This is all developed by Sri Lankans; 90% of our developers are Sri Lankan and the other 10% are from other parts of Asia. The telco app store is like the Apple app store, only for emerging markets and we plan on launching this in both Asia and the Middle East as well.

Q: Why are you focusing solely on emerging markets with this product?

A: Well the key with emerging markets is that if you look at the next growth of mobile phones, it’s going to be in the emerging markets. If you look at the current situation, the rest of the world is more saturated so emerging markets have a fantastic ability to grow their businesses and telecommunications is growing very rapidly in these markets.

The second thing is that there really aren’t app stores for emerging markets. There are two types of phones – feature phones and smartphones. 90% of the people have feature phones and not smartphones. If you don’t have a smartphone, you don’t have the chance to have access to an app store. Our software actually monetises the app store and provides it to all the people; we cover the whole of the pyramid starting from feature phones all the way up to smartphones.

Q: Looking at upcoming trends, what do you predict will happen in the foreseeable future in this field?

A: What we are focusing on is on mobile applications. In time to come, phones are going to get proliferated to everybody so the ability for people to access information will be provided through the mobile, rather than from the computer. We are now encouraging our application developers to build applications that are relevant to the rest of the country.

For example, if farmers can check current crop prices or if a fisherman can check the prices of fish – a lot of this sort of information can and will come through the mobile; it will not happen through computers anymore. The mobile I would say reduce the whole digital divide in time to come so applications will be a key part of this.

If the internet and Facebook can be considered the revolution in the past 10 years, then mobiles and mobile applications will be the revolution in the next 10 years. There will be a lot of m-learning and a lot of information, and I think Sri Lanka is situated very well in this context. We have a lot of good developers who are able to develop these kinds of applications and we are a country very rich in capabilities and talented people and all the applications that we are sending out are developed by people here. Our skill set is incredible and we have a fantastic future.

The mobile will be the wave and tablets and other such devices that are now coming out will enable that and as a country I think we should actually focus on that. We should focus on building the next generation in applications.

Q: How has the company performed overall in the past year?

A: hSenid Mobile and hSenid as a group in fact has grown. We are number one in HR in Sri Lanka and we have over 85% market share from the HR side. Similarly, hSenid mobile has also grown very well in international markets. Last year, we acquired the largest operators in Indonesia as one of our customers.  We are also focusing on Latin American markets as we have opportunities there as well as the Middle East.

As a company we have grown rapidly and we have been recruiting top tier resources which are necessary as we are a product company; we provide mobile products to operators. Our customers are operators and aggregators. Aggregators are the people who use our systems to provide services to a wider range of subscribers from all the operators. From a recruitment side, we have found very good engineers in Sri Lanka, our talent pool is incredible.

Q: From where do you recruit the necessary human resources and talent?

A: We recruit mostly from the universities and other higher education institutions. Interestingly, some of the people who develop into our platform are individuals who have fulltime day jobs but they do this as a part time job which is how the industry was built in the West.

Sri Lanka has excellent potential; we need to harness it, showcase it and tell people who we are and what we are capable of. These awards reiterate that and that is why awards of this kind are so important, not just for us as hSenid Mobile, but also for the country as it puts the country on the world map. I always say that one of our key objectives is to put Sri Lanka on the map as a destination for innovation.

Sri Lanka is really coming forward and I think one of the reasons for that could be because our education system in a way trains people well in these areas and the exposure that people get here is another key aspect. It’s skill plus exposure that gives you the right talent.

Q: Going back to the issue of venture capital, how do you think it can be encouraged in our markets?

A: That problem I would say is like the chicken and egg issue, in the sense that venture capitalists don’t go to countries where it hasn’t been proven but to prove that it can be done, you need to have venture capital backed companies. I think what needs to happen is that one or two companies need to break out of the mould and get acquired or have an IPO and showcase that and once that happens, you will find more venture capitalists coming in.

The other thing is to look at R and D centres of larger companies and encourage them to set up here which would also help to open up the venture capital market. India for one is very big in venture capital. Most of the US venture capital companies have their subsidiaries in India and they in turn are investing in Indian companies. So one of the things that we can do is go and tap into that venture capital community and I think this should be done in order to ignite the venture capital led market here.

Q: What are hSenid Mobile’s plans for the foreseeable future?

A: Our plans for the future are very aggressive and we want to innovate on what we have already done. We were the first to launch the telco app store, the first to launch a cloud enabled service delivery platform in addition to the launch of a developer community for the telco app stores and for the cloud.

Our plans are to further develop these and take our developers into other markets as our products are being sold in international markets and we have very aggressive plans to enter new emerging markets. We are now recruiting more on the business development area in order to move into these markets. For us, the key to grow in these markets is to have the right people which are a crucial part of our future plans.

Pic by Upul Abeyasekara