Amid mounting layoffs and company bankruptcies across the entire telecommunications sector, a little start-up out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, is making its debut, hoping to capitalize on the growing voice-enabled applications market.
OkamLogic Inc. is beta testing its Wireless Voice Commerce Gateway, a suite of voice applications specifically developed for the telecommunication, energy and utility industries. The company said once WVCG is installed on a wireless carrier’s network, field workers will be able to use their cellular phones to dial into a central database and instruct the database to retrieve schedules, data and other information, and have it read back to them.
Scott Thomas, president and CEO of OkamLogic, said that because there are several others already in the voice-enabled applications market that are developing and offering customer relationship management tools for call centers and other customer service entities, OkamLogic thinks the telecommunication, utility and energy industries are fertile grounds for new business. They traditionally have a high number of mobile workers.
“CRM has lots of big players with deep pockets,” Thomas also said. “It didn’t make sense for us to go head-to-head with the bigger gorillas in the industry.”
And while it may seem unusual-maybe even suicidal-to start up a business during this time of economic uncertainty, Thomas said the future of voice-commerce services is promising enough for him, and the company’s three other founders, to want to take a gamble.
“What has happened in the past several months has been challenging, to say the least, but there are a lot of trends and developments in the marketplace that are compelling,” said Thomas.
Among them, the Yankee Group has said it expects there will be 25 million primarily mobile workers in the United States by 2005.
OkamLogic is partnering with several companies, including Nuance Communications Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Aliant Telecom, Canada’s third-largest telecommunications provider, to help develop its applications.
Thomas said applications are being fine-tuned in cooperation with its beta clients, which include Aliant, Sempra Atlantic Gas and Emera Fuels, a fuel provider to the maritime industry. The applications will be vendor, device and network agnostic, and should be ready for commercial deployment by late next year.
The company now is trying to secure its first round of venture-capital financing. The four founders and Aliant made initial investments in OkamLogic.
The company was founded in August, 2000, and has seven employees.
