Venturing into mobile commerce
BroadVision, Inc. has teamed up with 4 other major corporations to form a new Business Services Provider (BSP) dedicated to delivering B2B commerce services to the wireless market.
The company, tentatively dubbed B-Mobile Corporation, will be the first initiative ever to integrate the explosive wireless market with the global enterprise B2B market.
The new company will develop and rapidly deliver a new generation of “small but smart” e-business applications and services that will integrate an enterprise with its mobile workforce and its mobile business end-users.
Partners to the venture, aside from BroadVision, are H&Q Asia Pacific, a leading private equity investor in Asia, Access Co. Ltd., supplier of browser technology for non-PC devices, and Itochu Techno-Science Corporation (CTC), a system integrator and services company and ITOCHU Corporation, a Tokyo Stock Exchange listed general trader.
The venture will base its offerings on BroadVision One-To-One™ e-business applications and the company’s next-generation XML content management and XSL device-independent rendering technologies.
“This new company will be the first in Japan, and perhaps in the world, to provide the crucial B2B link between
an enterprise and all its mobile constituencies,” said Dr. Pehong Chen, president and CEO of BroadVision.
H&Q Asia Pacific, with its long-term commitment to the Japanese wireless market, brought its strategic portfolio
company ACCESS into the deal while serving as the lead investor in the joint venture.
“The combination of our original investment vision for ACCESS as the foundation for a leading-edge wireless portfolio, and the tremendous acceptance of the wireless Internet in Japan, positions us to forge a whole new market space with m-commerce,” said Dr. Ta-lin Hsu, founder and chairman of H&Q Asia Pacific.
ACCESS Co. will provide its core and lend its deep expertise in wireless technology.
“Our years of experience in powering small-footprint devices helped propel the amazing consumer adoption of i-mode. We predict the next big trend is B2B m-commerce applications,” said Mr. Toru Arakawa, president and CEO of ACCESS Co., Ltd. “We are very proud to be a member of this joint venture and welcome the opportunity to drive the wireless revolution to a new level.”
CTC with its vast mobile workforce in field sales and services and comprehensive network of enterprise clients, will be both the de facto distribution channel for the new BSP as well as the first and largest reseller of BroadVision in Japan.
“CTC has accumulated tremendous expertise in building the current DoCoMo infrastructure,” said Mr. Osamu Gotoh, president and CEO of CTC. “As one of the largest IT providers in Japan, we also understand keenly the enterprise needs for B2B m-commerce. We are very confident that we can help the new BSP deliver its services to our enterprise clients.”
“Itochu Corporation recently shifted its business emphasis on B2B and mobile devices,” said Mr. Eizo Kobayashi, an executive board member of Itochu Corporation, “This new project, providing ‘One-to-One’ service on mobile network, is expected to proliferate into the future. We intend to commit ourselves to the project, utilising our group-wide consolidated power.”
Furthermore, the new business is teaming up with NTT Communications Inc, one of the largest IP service Providers Japan, including the use of their data center. The executive vice president of NTT Com, Mr. Shuji Tomita said, “It is obvious that mobile-related business will grow rapidly, and its growth will be even accelerated by the commitment of major corporations such as BroadVision, H&Q Asia Pacific, ACCESS,CTC and Itochu Corporation. We feel honored to be able to contribute to the new business by providing our network system as well as the data center, which was founded last year meeting its high security requirements”.