Richard Schwartz, President, CEO and Founder, SoloMio

Richard Schwartz has started three different venture capital-backed companies, and helped grow the firms that bought the first two — Borland Software and Vignette — by helping them better manage carrier accounts. He thinks he has a fix on how to coax carriers to invest in new applications: “Service providers are most successful when you give them new services that start with their core competencies,” said Schwartz, president and CEO of SoloMio.

With that in mind, Austin, Texas-based SoloMio, which Schwartz launched as a spinoff from Vignette two years ago, is supplying carriers with data capabilities that enhance the utility of the voice services they manage for corporate enterprises. SoloMio's Smart Call platform gives users more control over their incoming voice calls, including missed calls, which otherwise turn out to be lost revenue for carriers.

When users have incoming calls, network-based Smart Call automatically routes the calls to their mobile handsets, generating a menu of options for how to handle each call. There are also options for how to handle calls in progress. The menus additionally present extensive caller ID information when users receive calls so they'll have more to work with than just a number that looks familiar.

At a time when carriers and their applications developer partners are trying to figure out which innovative, new data services will knock corporate users' socks off, the Smart Call platform takes an almost subversive approach.

“There was this belief before that mobile data growth would supplant voice, but people are struggling to figure out which data services work,” Schwartz said. “We took a contrary view, that data could be brought to bear as a technology — rather than as a service — that could benefit voice usage and make the mobile phone much better at handling calls.”

With carriers anticipating potentially high churn from enterprise customers as number portability takes hold, more intelligent call handling could keep customers in the fold, Schwartz said. “Any service that makes the phone less a commodity and more a business tool — that's a churn killer.”