Shares in “Sharing Economy” telecommunications pioneer Norwood Systems Ltd (ASX: NOR) have surged today after the company announced it had successfully replicated the full core mobile phone user experience using its award-winning Over-The-Top (OTT) platforms: Corona Cloud, World Phone and World Message (in beta) using the mobile phone network numbering range to deliver seamless OTT Telephony and Messaging. It believes this to be the World’s first implementation of a complete ‘OTT-Mobile Convergence’ service.
Operating on the mobile device’s 3G/4G data channel, Norwood’s solution delivers seamless OTT Telephony and seamless OTT Messaging (including bidirectional SMS support over OTT) using a second independent mobile number on the handset as the caller ID. This development makes it possible for a fully virtualised corporate mobile phone service on an employee’s personal handset. This is ideal for mobile devices such as iPhones and Android devices where a second SIM is not supported.
Norwood believes existing corporate mobile phone numbers will be able to be easily ported into this service, allowing for a seamless corporate transition from existing high-cost mobile services to low-cost OTT BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) services.
According to the company this solution creates an independent second virtual handset supported within the mobile phone for alternate voice and messaging services, say for business calls and texts. Norwood believes that companies stand to become significant beneficiaries of such solutions, with Norwood believing that Australian businesses can save around 70% of their monthly mobile fleet expenses by moving to Norwood’s implementation of BYOD using its World Phone, World Message and Corona Cloud platforms.
Commenting on this significant development, Norwood Systems’ CEO and Founder, Paul Ostergaard, said, “This is a technical breakthrough for Norwood. We are making big strides in our quest to deliver ever more seamless OTT services to the market and our team has done terrific work here: Firstly, to define the ‘OTT-Mobile Convergence’ proposition, and secondly, to deliver this proposition to market, eliminating the last vestiges of meaningful differences between mobile network services and OTT voice and OTT messaging services.
“It is our understanding that this is the first time that combined OTT voice and OTT messaging services, including ‘SMS over OTT’, have been delivered using a mobile phone number as the single ID for those OTT services. Using the mobile phone network numbering range for both messages and voice calling makes it very difficult indeed to tell our service apart from a regular mobile phone service.
“It sets the perfect stage for substitution of an organisation’s expensive mobile hardware fleet with light-weight, low-cost virtualised voice and messaging services, delivered by our award-winning Apps and service platforms: a mobile phone number; the World Phone App and the World Message App that together behave very similarly to the corresponding native Apps; the whole shooting match in one low-cost packaged OTT solution! This will be a great solution for our clients in the Company’s BYOD sales pipeline.
“With recent support for OTT Apps provided by leading handset vendors such as Apple, it makes sense now to target the OTT end-game, namely full ‘OTT-mobile convergence’. Simply, this is the full convergence of OTT voice and messaging services with Mobile Communications, and it is exactly the breakthrough we have just achieved.
The full ‘OTT-Mobile Convergence’ service is currently being piloted by selected leading Australian institutions and will shortly be released to market once the World Message beta phase concludes. While these pilots are specifically using Australian “04” mobile numbers, the Company can source similarly capable mobile numbers for other countries from its telco partners.
By noon AEST NOR shares were trading 13% above its opening price, at 3.5c per share, with more than $1.3 million worth of shares being traded.