With the sheer volume of e-mail making the Internet increasingly less desirable to mass marketers, the cellphone is rapidly becoming the medium of choice.
And to exploit that technology fully, South African-based Mobile Internet Gateway (MIG) has developed a unique package that allows customers to send dynamic SMS messages to GSM cellular telephones anywhere in the world.
What makes the MIG system unique is the fact that the SMS program is resident on the client database. Ensuring total security, messages are generated on the client database, automatically encrypted and sent via Internet to the MIG gateway.
Mobile Internet gateway MD Derek Fingleson, said it took engineers more than five years to develop the totally unique system.
"What differentiates MIG from other players in the SMS arena is the fact that we offer total flexibility and absolute security. Most businesses are absolutely dependent on the information on their database and will not do anything that prejudices that data.
"Because our package is resident on the client`s database, he is able to compile message lists for transmission before sending the encrypted data to our gateway. The other huge benefit of our system is the fact that it dynamically links to the client database allowing the transmission of real-time messages to as many cellular phones as required."
With the nearly 10 million cellular phones in SA expected to nearly double by 2005, SMS offers the most effective personalised marketing tool currently available, Fingleson said.
Because the system is fully interactive and bi-directional, businessmen can use the service to query their company database from their favourite golf course or, by entering a key word, can set a predefined course of events in motion - even to the point where IT managers can reboot computers or check on the health of servers.
Limited only by the inventiveness and ingenuity of the user, MIG`s innovative technology opens up vast new horizons for niche marketing, remote administration and interactive database querying.
The response from the market has been overwhelmingly positive and deals worth millions of rand are in the pipeline. There has also been substantial interest from international operators in Japan, the US and Europe.
"This is clearly a technology whose time has come. We are in talks with some of the biggest players in corporate SA and abroad who are as excited about this technology as we are," Fingleson said.
"Predefined actions are limited only by the inventiveness of the user. Literally any event or chain of events can be set in motion by typing in a predefined key word. This will activate a program on the remote database setting in motion an event or series of events that have been pre-programmed," Fingleson said.
Among the many applications for the MIG technology currently under consideration is a system for a major tertiary educational institution that will send exam results to students via SMS.
Businessmen can quite literally now run their operations from their mobile phones, Fingleson said.
"We can cater for and manage the full spectrum of Internet and mobile needs for companies. By offering totally secure integration with the full range of database applications including Oracle, SQL, AS400, Sybase and others, we are exploiting the world-wide trend in integrating the Internet with wireless telecommunications," Fingleson said.
Share
Editorial contacts