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hSenid Mobile, founded in 1997, has been in the VAS (Value Add Service) / programmable telecoms space throughout its history. In 2013 they launched with Dialog Axiata an innovation ecosystem called Ideamart. I consider Ideamart to be the most successful telecom innovation ecosystems in the world. Accounting for 10-15 % of Dialog Axiata’s revenue.

Some of the early Ideamart evangelists have gone on to work for Google and Amazon across Asia. Like Shafraz Rahim, who has also presented at TADSummit, when he worked for Dialog.

Here is Dialog Axiata and hSenid Mobile presenting at TADSummit in 2014. Check out the About Us section of Ideamart. See how they position what they do, Idea Apps and Idea Pro. Back in 2014 they were focused on no code, templates (easy to use web pages), so a small business owner could run simple SMS campaigns, or create a temporary app for a event.

Idea Apps are by far the more popular method in Ideamart. There’s so much wrapped around ideamart, including country-wide engagement across developer and innovator communities, internet centers, universities, schools, groups empowering underrepresented segments of society, and so much more. Fraud management and governance is inherent in the platform, and actively managed. Easy is key for people to create locally relevant apps. Google / Apple have their app stores, yet there remains lots of opportunity for building apps for Sri Lanka and regions within the country.

While P2P has moved to Whatsapp and Viber, ideamart has kept A2P SMS relevant, safe, and secure for consumers and businesses.

The current Camara BS (reincarnation of OneAPI) does not compare to what ideamart, mspace, and BDapps deliver to their countries. Last year Unifonic explained their country by country focus at TADSummit, and we saw this year Deutsche Telekom win Virtual Q away from Twilio through taking a country focus. Note this win had nothing to do with Ericsson / Vonage, rather Signalwire For telcos the wins are local, not global, down to regions within your countries of operations.

However, the reason there are not many more deployments of Ideamart around the world is the GSMA’s drive behind OneAPI. I witnessed carriers evaluate hSenid Mobile, and reject them because it was not OneAPI. Even though hSenid Mobile had multiple proven successes, and a complete solution / recipe to build country-wide innovation ecosystem.

The GSMA should be thoroughly ashamed of forcing carriers to miss this innovation opportunity. I cover this in more detail in “The Problem with some industry fora.” As this is a systemic issue within telecoms, API standards are the worst thing you can do. Easy is what matters.

The continued success of idearmart has surprised and delighted everyone involved. They’ve learned much through the years of experimentation, such as the complexity for WebRTC, the continued popularity of ‘joke of the day’ and information services.

There is carrier interest in Camara around Asia, but not ‘yet’ developer interest. Singapore is taking a lead as they have 5GSA nationally deployed. It’s a uniquely small and dense country. South Korea is also taking a lead in building a competence in Camara, but does not have 5GSA nationally deployed, which is critical for 5G Network QoS APIs to work.

The future of ideamart is taking advantage of the dominance of the plumbing layer (transport) and services (Apps) from 10 years of operations and building out customer insight, analytics, and productivity use cases.

For example, there are ideamart applications linked to highly localized gig or temporary workers. Better matching supply with demand of the right skilled workers, at the right place, at the right time; maximizing productivity. Simple scheduling, process automations, and agent functions that to not require expensive enterprise software, rather easy apps and templates that work over SMS.

Please sign up for TADSummit, 22-23 Oct, Dinesh will be presenting on their latest developments and achievements with ideamart, mspace, and BDapps.

Remember OneAPI and it’s reincarnation Camara has wasted a decade for some telcos, while a few, have achieve world-leading results by NOT listening to the GSMA, rather listening to hSenid Mobile.