WIN, a provider of interactive mobile information and entertainment services, today confirmed it had agreed a strategic alliance with global systems integration and business transformation specialist, Tech Mahindra.
Under the terms of the initial agreement, Tech Mahindra will work with WIN to develop the company's next generation mobile platform. As a first step in a broader strategic alliance the two companies will also look to develop joint go-to-market strategies in key territories, notably Tech Mahindra's strong Asian market.
Announcing the agreements, WINplc CEO Graham Rivers said: "This is an exciting investment in the future by WIN. The initial project with Tech Mahindra will extend WIN's market leadership by providing improved service set-up and monitoring capabilities, enhanced transaction reporting and analysis with significant improvements in capacity and throughput to support even more media and feature rich services.
"We plan to migrate all our existing customers across to the new platform in the next 12 months and at the same time embark on a programme with Tech Mahindra to take our extended capability to a wider audience," he added.
The new platform that Tech Mahindra will develop for WIN will provide increased functionality, new payments solutions and faster throughput of transactions across a broad range of media services. It will also build on the investments WIN has made in the last two years on web and WAP-based services and portals, video streaming, audio, entertainment content and online storefront management tools.
Welcoming the alliance, Jagdish Mitra, CEO CanvasM (Tech Mahindra's VAS subsidiary) commented: "WIN has been a leader in providing VAS services in Europe and their expertise in delivering information and entertainment to mobile phone users in Europe has great replication potential and can be integrated into broader outsourced service offerings and other efficiency tools for large enterprises.
"Our experience in offering VAS services in India, South East Asia and the Middle East offers significant synergistic value. The customer reach combined with the expertise of our two organisations is very complementary and we are excited about the prospects of being able to develop joint initiatives together that maximise our core strengths."
As part of the broader agreement, WIN will have access to Tech Mahindra's applications and outsourcing services including development resources for large scale projects. This will also enable WIN to focus its own development team on core product and service enhancement.