'UNICEL services are getting accepted in tier 2 cities', says Sanjay Aggarwal of Unicel Technologies

UNICEL Technologies have 1000+ enterprise clients with a major chunk of fortune 500 brands in the country and is a winner of prestigious Red Herring Awards. Today, the company has a turnover of 100 crores where 95% of the revenue is generated by SMSes only. UNICEL allows customization of solutions for business-specific needs, earning itself the status of a specialist in technology solutions. Network-level integration with operators has enabled Unicel to pioneer various technological innovations and helped it achieve the highest SLAs and service reliability available today. In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Sanjay Aggarwal, CEO, Unicel Technologies shared his views on cloud communication solutions for enterprises based on Voice, SMS, mail and USSD

Can you elaborate on UNICEL solutions?

UNICEL provides cloud based communication services to enterprises across SMS, Voice, USSD, and Email. Services enabled by APIs can be directly integrated into the customer’s applications. SaaS based applications are designed to meet the most prevalent business needs. An intense belief in the potential of cloud communications to innovate and deliver these services in a uniquely simple and integrated way is what the company thrives on, every day.

What is your go-to-market strategy?

UNICEL’s strategy to approach the market is through direct sales team in major cities of the country with preferred partners in other cities. Our long history and reputation continue to be a vital source of quality referrals and positive word-of-mouth in the marketplace.

What is the current employee strength? Do you have any plans to increase the no. of employees or any expansion in other cities?

UNICEL is headquartered at Bangalore with 8 regional offices and a vast reseller network across India. We are currently a 100 plus strong team.

Our business model is highly scalable and we would selectively add staff to help fuel our growth in future to fulfill specific requirements keeping in mind the current employee strength.

How your solutions (enterprise mobility) can help IT organizations?

UNICEL Technologies gives enterprises the access to the power of mobile communications with minimal investment or technical complexity by bringing mobile communication to a cloud based platform. Our SaaS based services can be effortlessly integrated to customer applications by API`s. The advanced and convergent UNICEL platform provides innovation, functionality, security and control.

What are the recent developments at the company/IT company?

We have enabled single sign-on to access UNICEL data and voice services on our platform that cascades to improved service levels and enhanced functionalities such as content transformation. As a leading provider of integrated cloud communication services across SMS, Voice, E-Mail and USSD we feel it is our responsibility to enable world class technology services for our enterprise clients. A large part of our investments goes into R&D to fulfill that responsibility. We pay a lot of attention to product development.

What steps are you going to take to tap the growing need of efficiency and security in the online world?

We strive hard to make UNICEL products Easy-to-Use for our customers. For that our efforts have always been inclined towards attributing the simplicity of SMS to Voice and other UNICEL offerings. In long term we intend to offer the enterprise community such services where there is minimal dependency on the service provider.

We have state-of-the-art security measures deployed on our platform and we conduct best –in- class security audits at frequent intervals.

Which are the verticals going more for UNICEL? Which regions are you targeting now?

While we continue to remain strong in BFSI, E-Commerce and IT/BPO, we are also seeing appreciable acceptance of UNICEL services in high potential tier 2 cities.

What is your channel strategy?

We work with preferred partners in non tier 1 cities.

What edge do your services offer to customers?

UNICEL specializes in providing end-to-end services to enterprises. UNICEL`s proprietary telecom infrastructure deployed with multiple telecom operators in the country to ensure highest service levels and maximum scalability gives the company its cutting edge over the competitors. In addition, our market leading user experience design is in place to ensure maximum user satisfaction. Secondly but just as important, our employees are committed to keeping the customer happy. This is reflected in the 24x7 after sales support we provide, which is considered the best customer support in the industry

Which companies do you consider as your competition in the Indian market?

We compete with mGage, SMS Gupshup and Valuefirst.

Have you come across weak points or what challenges you face in the Indian market?

The constantly changing Regulatory and Telecom Operator environment have always been an area of concern for the industry.

Any tie-ups to be announced in near future?

We will only be able to share this if something concrete develops.

What are the business expectations and targets that you have to set out to meet?

We aim to achieve growth across levels, with a turnover estimation of `200 crores in the next few years.

What are the company’s future plans?

We have ambitious plans. Growing at 25% y-o-y we see a strong organic growth from our existing customer base in future for UNICEL. There is a promising opportunity in leveraging big data to help our customers in knowing their users better since mobile continues to remain the primary medium of communication in India.

 Sushma Rani

(sushmar@cybermedia.co.in)