The beginning of July saw the beginning of a new chapter in lives of two of India’s less known companies, OnMobile and Quatrro (now, this line might sound a little controversial). OnMobile Global Limited, India’s largest telecom VAS & data solutions company, announced that it has acquired speech recognition company Telisma SA of France for €11 million.
Telisma is Europe’s leading speech recognition software company. They enable customer friendly & automated voice services over the telephone and at home with high quality speech recognition software in the major European and North American languages.
As per their website, Telisma has voice recognition software available in 10 Indian languages – Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi and English. Telisma’s R&D development provides a great platform for launching new language models and rapid launch of new voice based services around the world. Thus, the acquisition will enable OnMobile to penetrate into fast growing emerging markets as well as the already established European market by developing new speech recognition language models. Since this technology enables quick and easy access to mobile applications and content, it further strengthens OnMobile’s mobile applications product suite. As of 2008, OnMobile has a 200% increase in content usage via M-Search was recorded.
This is the third acquisition completed by OnMobile in the past three years. The earlier two being Voxmobili, a French data products company and ITfinity, another mobile data company. OnMobile Global shares rose by 1.56% to close at 646.55 after acquiring Voxmobili. So, whether this deal will continue to do wonders for OnMobile, will be a good question to ponder on.
Arvind Rao, CEO & co-founder of OnMobile said, “We are excited about joining hands with Telisma …. [Telisma's] leadership in speech technologies perfectly complement our expertise in speech application development, enabling the way for a new generation of innovative telecom services.“
Laurent Balaine, CEO of Telisma, said, “We’re confident that the combined strengths, services expertise, and talent of our companies will deliver a great experience for Users, Service Providers and mobile operators..“
Nothing has been mentioned on whether Laurent Balaine will remain with the company post. The funny thing is, OnMobile had recently completed a deal with Nasdaq listed Nuance Web Solutions for voice based search in 15 different languages, what’s gonna happen to that deal then?
Gurgaon-based Quatrro BPO Solutions Pvt Ltd is keeping its global expansion plans afloat, even as it focuses on the domestic BPO opportunity. Quatrro acquired UK-based Babel Media, a provider of specialist outsourced services to gaming and interactive entertainment industry. While refusing to comment on the size of the deal, Mr. Raman Roy (chairman and MD) said that it was the largest deal by the BPO firm. Quatrro, he said, is now eyeing acquisitions in the range $50-210 million. The company had previously announced that they are now close to acquiring a firm for $100 million that is in ‘a totally different domain’ and in a February interview, Raman Roy had expressed his intention of expanding to Europe and Asia, in addition to North America.
It’s so visible that Indian companies who are planning to make it big in the global market have chosen media firms as their prime targets.
“now, this line might sound a little controversial”
didnt get this…
The statement that Quatrro and OnMobile are minows, can be a one which some might disagree with. Hence “this line might sound a little controversial.”