Buongiorno India* and IBM Agree Partnership to Provide Leading Indian Telecoms Subscribers With a "Best in Class" Mobile Content Delivery Platform

GURGAON, India, March 18, 2011 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Buongiorno India, the joint venture between Mitsui & Co. Ltd and Buongiorno Group (FTSE Italy STAR: BNG), a leading global enabler of the mobile connected life, announces that it has signed an agreement with IBM to integrate Buongiorno's Subscription Engine with IBM's Service Delivery Platform solution for the customers of one of the leading operators in India.

The agreement is for seven years and confirms Buongiorno's position as a preferred partner for telecoms and hardware manufacturers across the globe.

Andrea Casalini, CEO of Buongiorno, commented: "We are very proud to be partnering with IBM to offer a unique Subscription Engine platform that will enable over 78 million subscribers to access a wide range of mobile content. The agreement demonstrates Buongiorno's capacity to develop its business in the growing Indian mobile value-added services market. Buongiorno has the ability to bring to each market, from developed through to emerging markets, the best products for users."

Buongiorno's consolidated platform acts as a single hub and a single integrated point for all partner services: for billing, service/scheme handling, content fetching, delivery, reporting and reconciliation. The platform enables the operator to manage all aspects of mobile products and services, and its vendors/content partners, across all operating regions from one centralized hosting.

Buongiorno, with its 10 years' leadership in mobile content, is well positioned to seize the opportunities that will arise in the Indian market. The market is fast growing with over 600 million of mobile subscriptions, according to the Telephone Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Subscription numbers have doubled in the last 2 years and that trend is expected to continue. In particular, the smartphone market is expected to grow to c.40 million by the end of 2015 (from about 10 million at the end of 2010).

Technological Features

The deal will enable one of the leading Indian telco subscribers to access a wide range of mobile content and services such as Short Message Service Interactive Voice Response, Web, Wap and Caller RingBack Tone through IBM Service Delivery Platform and Buongiorno's Subscription Engine.

Buongiorno's Subscription Engine provides a strong and effective Product Platform for lifecycle management of subscription services of Operators. It is a configurable and scalable proprietary platform with high availability/in-built redundancy and proven reliability; it also makes service creation and product discovery easy across various layers including Short Message Service (SMS), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (ussd), Software Development Kit (SDK), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Web, Wap and Caller RingBack Tone (CRBT). Thanks to its Graphic User Interface based approach, the platform easily operates and manages a large number of services running into multiple thousands and transactions volumes of multiple tens of millions per day.

*Buongiorno Digital Innovation India Pvt. Ltd. (BDII) is a joint venture between Mitsui & Co. Ltd and Buongiorno Group. The JV operates in the APAC region with head office in Gurgaon, India.

Buongiorno's strength is its 75-plus Engineering team, which operates as an independent entity for all mobile VAS activities in India and APAC.

    Contacts:

    Eleonora Villanova
    Tel. +39-02-582131
    Email: [email protected]

    Buongiorno S.p.A

    PH +39-02-58213.512
    FAX +39-02-58431008

    http://www.buongiorno.com/

SOURCE Buongiorno Spa