Sigma Systems: SMBs Essential for Mobile Growth

Sigma Systems (News - Alert), a provider of operational support solutions for device provisioning, services order management, service configuration and activation, reports that tapping the lucrative SMB market is essential for mobile growth, which has seen a global decline in voice calls and SMS messages.

Sigma Systems’ solutions include order management, provisioning and activation, and active mediation of residential and business VoIP, broadband, video and triple-play and quad-play services. According to the company, mobile operators must adjust their stance toward the increasing number of over the top (OTT) services and embrace mutually beneficial partnership models because this will allow for monetization of new services, which in turn will open new channels of revenue with the SMB sector.

The company suggests that global voice and messaging revenue is declining and will go down further to below the 60 percent threshold in 2013. On the other hand, the OTT application and services market continues to grow and is expected to be worth $166.5 billion in 2016.

Rick Mallon, vice president of marketing and product management at Sigma Systems, said in a statement, “With billions of dollars of revenue at stake, it is clear that operators must change their approach to OTT players. While there is great opportunity in the SMB market, operators have to adjust their relationship with them to exploit the tidal wave of new, independent apps, services and content providers that SMBs are demanding. Sigma Systems is focused on helping operators tap into this innovation by expanding service offerings and packages, and accelerating their time-to-revenue from several months to just a few weeks.”

Software as a service (SaaS (News - Alert)) applications market is growing as the SMB customers are adopting this technology. These applications are meant to access to online backup, customer relationship management (CRM), office productivity and unified communication software, especially for mobile and flexible workforces.

According to an estimate of The Federation of Small Businesses, the U.K.’s SMB sector will spend £2.1 billion (approximately $3.17 billion) on business application software and SaaS by 2015.


Edited by Rachel Ramsey