As wireless phones become smaller on the outside, their usefulness to the outside world continues to grow. In addition to wireless Internet capabilities, newly designed unified messaging and voice recognition technologies are opening up a whole new avenue for cellular phone users and new revenue streams for wireless providers.
Appiant Technologies Inc., formerly known as Nhancement Technologies, is combining these capabilities to allow wireless service providers, competitive local exchange carriers, traditional wired telephone companies and corporate enterprises to offer what it calls unified communications and information services to their customers and employees.
For wireless service providers it is the chance to not only boost activations, but earn incremental monthly revenue and most importantly reduce churn. Appiant was quick to point out that wireless service providers were a perfect match for their unified communications service due to the sticky nature of the offering.
“Once a user sets up the service through their provider, they will quickly find out how useful it is,” said Douglas Zorn, president and chief executive officer of Appiant. “And due to the wealth of information that can be accessed from the service, customers will want to use it often. It is the ultimate sticky product.”
Backed by Cisco Systems, the center piece of Appiant’s unified platform is a Web-based portal that houses all of a customer’s voice mail, fax mail, e-mail messages and attachments. The user can access all of their information on the portal via a wireless phone, computer, wired telephone or personal digital assistant.
The portal’s unified communications hub also provides a personal portal for all inbound and outbound calls, and allows the user to set a single number reach that will automatically forward calls to all the preselected phone numbers until the user can be reached. Zorn added that Appiant’s advantages over other messaging solutions include its head start in providing unified messaging services and voice over Internet Protocol to customers including wireless carrier VoiceStream Wireless Services Inc.
While the initial service offerings will include voice recognition technology from Nuance, Appiant plans to include its own patented service beginning with the 4.0 version of its offering early next year.
“Our engine will offer a broader vocabulary base, be dialect independent, language independent and include a distributed architecture,” Zorn said. “These features will lessen the expense of opening communications channels for service providers.”
While Appiant will initially use its voice recognition technology exclusively for its offerings, Zorn said there is potential that the company may license the engine to others in the future.
For its other target markets, Appiant said the unified communications offering will allow CLECs to benefit from higher margins and increased revenue of value-added applications, while ISPs will benefit from the commodity differentiation and additional voice over Internet Protocol revenue the service can provide.
Appiant also said it would market the service to corporate enterprise customers, the only market it would sell direct to, where it carries no proprietary costs.
