BlackNGreen eyes for the Top spot in the VAS space

Rahul Gupta,
VP – Global Operations,
BlackNGreen shares with VARINDIA more about the company that has its roots in India and how it is keen on exploring the Indian market after consolidating itself across the globe 

Tell us more about BlackNGreen and its operations worldwide.

We are a company headquartered out of Chennaibut have not yet started operating in India market, though we always wanted to be here in this market. It was a little tough for us because of the many regulations laid by the Government in the telecom sector. So it was easier for us to venture outside andhence decided to grab the low hanging fruits first.That is how we got our first client outside. Our international growth story is still growing at a rapid pace. But nonetheless, India is always on our charts.Though we are concentrating globally now, we will come to India as and when the time is right. We are still trying to understand and analyze what is happening around the VAS domain in this market. Since we will start pan India,there is still lot of work for us to do.

At present, we have offices in Delhi, Bangladesh, Dubai, Nigeria, Uganda and many other places. In fact, we try to look after all the neighbouring markets from a particular hub that we set up. For instance, if we have a hub in Nigeria, all neighbouring markets will be catered to.

How is the global scenario at present when we talk about the VAS industry?

The global VAS industry is not as stringent as the India market in terms of regulations. Globally we divide the market into various segments – Asia Pacific, Middle-East, Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America. We are dealing with the entire globe and each market has its own culture, regulations and experiences. It is a little easier to set up business there than in India. People love to experience with the new services and are open to new ideas.Our 800 million customers comprise of countries like Africa, Asia Pacific and European countries.

VAS as a domain has been very successful in Africa. 30% of our business comes from South Africa while the rest 70% from the rest of Africa. We became the fastest uptake of VAS services and revenue generator in Nigeria in just 1 month. The MTN Group after its launch in Africa decided to take our product as their white-level product. Similarly our agreement with Airtel Group is in place which is going to be launched in May or June of 2014. We are going to close the contract with the Vodafone Group in Tanzania, Ghana and Egypt and Tigo Group in Tanzania, Rwanda and Ghana.

We have just started in Europe and are in talks with a couple of telecom providers in Italy. In USA, we are in talks with Verizon and Sprint. Since network technology is little different in USA (they work with 4G),we are changing our technology to supportthis market. We could be there by June this year. In Middle East, we are in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus and will cover the rest of the countries very soon.

Could you brief us more about your services?

VAS though in the last 8-10 years has existed but has not had mass penetration. But now it is coming to the forefront. While thinking of building an application, we stumbled upon the idea of doing something around voice, about building a product that will find mass acceptance. People love to do things around their voice, like giving a choice to talking in Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse voice. This idea came around 2009 and took couple of years to mature.

Voice changing was a very difficult technology.We tried to pick algorithms from internet, talked to different people, professors from Oxford and worked with people who have 14 years of research experience into voice change. We tried to develop algorithms with them. Since voice changing was a CPU intensive algorithm, I could not possibly run two voice changing apps simultaneously in the computer. What we needed was a telecom grade voice changing solution which can do 1000-2000 voice changing at the same time. These algorithms had to be burned in hardware, as they did not run as softwareand only then we could achieve the efficiency and clarity.It took us 3 years and finally we were ready with our product in April 2011.

When we took it to the market, we took around 6-8 months to get our first client. Our first client came in February 2012. We are now present in 40 + countries and it has been an exciting journey for us. Magic Voice, as we have named this software has led the way for us and building our presence in 40 countries in just 2 years is quite an achievement. To be frank, we have now put a break on our sales for the last 8 months. We are still expanding our team and setting up our processes and fulfilling our orders.

What are the means of promotion for you?

We are a B2B company. Our customers are telecom operators and service providers. Soit is more of the people we know and meet in conferences. Initially It waslittle difficult to get started. But now we have a brand name in the market and we have built up case studies. So it is easier for us to market our own products.