Kodiak takes on India

While Kodiak Networks has been touting its push-to-talk solution in the U.S. and Europe, it has found a ripe market for an entirely different type of service in South Asia. It just closed its second major deal for its group conferencing and group messaging applications in India, tapping into a market where demand for small business services appears to be high.

At CTIA Wireless, Kodiak announced it had landed a deal for its Advanced Voice Services (AVS) platform with Bharti/Airtel, the largest GSM provider in India with 15 million customers. And earlier this week it revealed a similar deal with Idea, another Tier 1 GSM provider with 7 million customers. India has an estimated 75 million wireless subscribers on GSM and CDMA and with the two deals, Kodiak has locked in a potential third of the overall market.

Kodiak CEO Craig Farrill said that due to the lack of wireline infrastructure and services, voice conferencing and other work communications tools have yet to touch the majority of businesses in the country. At the same time, small businesses and entrepreneurs are fueling much of the rapid wireless growth in India. While many of Kodiak's customers in the west are launching its AVS services layered over its primary push-to-talk product, Kodiak has found that in India and other developing markets, those more basic business productivity tools are in much higher demand, Farrill said. For many Indian businesses Kodiak's voice bridge service is the first voice conferencing tool they've had access to, Farrill said.

"There is a lot of pent-up demand for business communications in India," Farrill said. "Consequently, a lot of business communications had migrated directly to wireless."

Though demand for push-to-talk isn't big in India now, it will eventually make a market for itself as an added feature to the instant communications platform Kodiak is building, Farrill said. And when that time comes, Kodiak will already have the infrastructure in place. The AVS platform is being deployed over Kodiak's Real Time Exchange, the standard server powering all of Kodiak's applications, including push-to-talk. The vendor is currently selling both carriers its Voice Bridge conferencing solution, its presence application, its group SMS solution and its contact and group management portal. Idea is also buying a walkie-talkie type service that isn't true push-to-talk, but allows group users to simulate a one-to-many push-to-talk experience once a call is initiated.

The client applications are SIM-card-based, meaning any GSM phone can be upgraded to use the new applications. In India, a SIM application is important because handset replacement cycles are much slower due to the relative cost of handsets to the average buyer, Farrill said. Kodiak is also developing a BREW application for the CDMA market.

Perhaps the most unique element of the deal is how it is structured. Kodiak is not selling infrastructure directly to Airtel and Bharti. Instead it is building, maintaining and running individual networks for the carriers, co-locating equipment in their facilities. Kodiak will expand the capacity as necessary, but it receives a share of all revenue from the services. It's a model that Ericsson and other vendors have popularized in the Indian wireless market.