Valuefirst invests $1 m for expansion

Ruwanthi Abeykoon

Valuefirst an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) has invested US $ One million during the past 12 months to provide mobile data service.

"Sri Lanka is ranked among the top in per capita mobile phone penetration in the South Asian region and is amongst the first countries in the region to launch 3G services.

The mobile network has been established despite the economic slowdown. The enterprise readiness for mobile data services assisted in exploring the Sri Lankan market", Valuefirst Sri Lanka, Srinand Sridharan said.

He also said that the target is large, medium and small enterprises. "We are in the final stage of partnering with local companies to reach out to the market. Email is limited and fixed telephony is poor. Mobile reach is wider and cost of transaction is lower," he added.

Co-founder, ValueFirst, Vijay Shukla said the mobile revolution in Sri Lanka has raced ahead of the Internet revolution. "With growing competition and decreasing margins, Enterprises have to be more competitive, increase in-house efficiency and provide better services.

Dissemination of information at the right time and place is now of prime importance to communicate with people on the move. There is an urgent need to fill this void of end-to-end communication within companies and with their customers. With a high mobile penetration, the ValueFirst suite of plug-and-play messaging products and mobile data services fit very well in plugging this gap," he said.

ValueFirst intends to take its mobile data services products and services to the Government departments, leading banks, insurance companies, FMCG, stock brokers, IT and media companies in the first year of operations in Sri Lanka. With a rich experience of service diverse markets and industries, ValueFirst intends to capture a major share of the market within the first year of its operations.

With a global footprint and operations in India, Lebanon, Middle East, Nigeria, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, UK and now Sri Lanka, ValueFirst focuses on B2B mobile applications and providing end-to-end SMS services to enterprises. With scalable architecture, a product driven approach, deployment is typically completed in a day.

These products can be deployed as client applications enabling easy integration with varied and complex IT back-end systems for automated and scheduled messaging.

A high level of redundancy of servers backs this with load balancing, fail-over mechanisms and least cost routing through a messaging platform deployed in three continents on three different IP backbones.