Telecom Lead India: Vserv.mobi, a global mobile advt. network with presence in emerging markets, is planning to have 200 employees in new offices in Southeast Asia, Africa & Latin America.
Ashay Padwal, chief technology officer & Co-Founder, Vserv.mobi, in an interview with TelecomLead.com, talks about new business opportunities and growth plans.
What are your expansion plans for 2013?
Vserv.mobi has been on a fast track growth path since inception. In the last three years, we have expanded our operations significantly and are continuing to sustain momentum going forward. We have achieved rapid scale and have grown from 2 co-founders in Mumbai in Jan 2010 to a 100+ member global Ad Network with offices in Mumbai, Delhi, London, Singapore, Jakarta, San Francisco & Ho Chi Minh City. By the end of 2013, we plan to have 200 employees in new offices planned across Southeast Asia, Africa & Latin America.
We are the first Mobile Ad Network in the world to come up with 2 game changing products that have revolutionized mobile advertising and enabled the growth of the entire mobile ecosystem. AppWrapper launched in April 2010, solves the monetization problems of
the developer ecosystem and AudiencePro lanuched in Jan 2013, enables advertisers reach their target audience with highly relevant ads. It enables Telcos to leverage their subscriber relationship data to Ad monetize their users across any site or app. Publishers and Developers experience higher levels of monetization, due to the audience profile layer being enabled on their inventory, without any additional cost. Our goal is to become the #1 Mobile Ad Network & App Monetization platform across emerging markets and reach $100 million in revenues by 2015.
2. How is biz shaping up in 2013 compared with 2012?
As mentioned before, we have been witnessing explosive growth in the past year and are bullish about 2013 as well. We kick-started this year with the launch of our path-breaking AudiencePro platform and partnered with Airtel for the same. Considering it presents a huge opportunity for the ecosystem, we plan to forge more partnerships with other leading telecoms globally. Our AppWrapper is now powering more than 20,000 apps and empowering app developers across the world. We recently tied up with London based Marmalade enabling their developers with enhanced monetization capabilities using our AppWrapper and AudiencePro platform. In Southeast Asia, we recorded massive growth with our Ad Requests growing 6X since 2012, we already have offices in SIngapore, Jakarta & Ho Chi Minh City and this year we will expand our on ground presence in other markets like Thailand, Malaysia & Philippines in the region. We are also expanding our footprints in North America and have hired a senior management resource who will focus on helping the developer ecosystem in the US monetize in emerging markets.
What are the new challenges and opportunities in the market?
For any ecosystem as it grows and evolves, challenges will emerge which is also the case with mobile. Whether it is the advertising agency, marketers or developers, they have to identify the numerous possibilities on this medium and understand the ecosystem in a short span of time. Some key questions which need to be answered include how fast can marketers learn and leverage this medium? Are brands ready to set aside dedicated resources to tackle the opportunities presented on this medium? The sooner brands address these questions the faster they will see results on mobile. Over the past year, we have
seen mobile grow as a preferred medium for Advertising, offering unparalleled reach and benefits over other mediums. India and other emerging markets like Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa are pegged amongst the fastest growing mobile advertising markets globally.
India has already crossed 100 million mobile internet users and will soon reach 200 million users. Around 40 percent of all mobile internet users in India have mobile as their only internet access point. In India, this revolution is being driven by the proliferation of Mobile Apps which are driving the Mobile ecosystem, similar to how websites powered desktop internet. Brands are fast coming up with apps because mobile apps being visually rich provide a far more immersive and engaging experience in addition to addressing the language barrier issue which is critical for reaching a pan-Indian audience. As the mobile medium grows, brands and developers are increasingly showing interest in our differentiated mobile media offerings that offers massive reach, unique ad placement, impactful ad formats which augurs well for us and the mobile advertising industry as a whole.
What are the reasons behind adopting cloud environment of Vserv.mobi?
As a Global Mobile Ad Network, Vserv.mobi deals with massive scale that can vary significantly as new partners come on board. To ensure we provide the best service to our clients we needed the ability to scale rapidly, both up and down. This level of elasticity was only possible by using the cloud. Also it reduces the capex, which for a startup can be a
significant blocking of resources better deployed elsewhere.
What challenges did the company face during the switch and how did you overcome those?
We never actually had to face the switch – we were born on the cloud. We built our applications to be compatible with the cloud from day 1. We did face a learning curve in optimising the application for the cloud, but we were rapidly able to improve with support of the provider and the community.
What mileage cloud platform is offering to the company?
The cloud has unprecedented advantages for a company like us that is starting up. Along with drastically reducing capex and time to market, the cloud also shields us from hardware failures which results in a high availability and close to 100 percent uptime. The cloud has fit in well
with our ambition of being a reputed global business.
How this new technology is offering more value to the clients?
Our clients have a zero lag “go-live” experience thanks to the exceptional scalability offered by the cloud. It is an experience we could not have achieved at a reasonable cost without leveraging cloud.
How is it helping the company to expand its avenues?
One of the great benefits of being on the cloud is the elimination of capex for hardware and thus the money we save is used for growing the business faster. The cloud has also allowed us to experiment at a much faster pace as infrastructure commitment and sizing is not
required. We thus have been able to become a rapid innovator in the space serving our customers better and penetrating markets faster.
Arvind Krishna
