Friday, March 20, 2009

A day in the history

I stumbled on an old document on my hard drive that I wrote in 2001. It was named "Fundamo competitors". I found it interesting to see who I rated as the players then and to think what became ofthem. Below is a list of companies that I viewed as competitors in 2002:
  • Arctic Website Hosting - I think they were acquired by some-one, but am not sure what happened to them
  • Macalla - Neill and his partners are still going strong
  • Mobile Magic from Finland - I don't know what happened to them
  • Brokat - remember the big collapse, then the Ecorus story and then the purchase of the assets by First Data?
  • Siemens - I think Siemens was re-selling Brokat solutions then (They also had a small stake in Brokat if I remember correctly)
  • Cellpay - This is the Israel-based company, also known as Adamtech. They closed down.
  • Trivnet - Still around. I think they are now doing well after some difficult years.
  • Digital Rum - Diversified and now selling different products
  • ACI - I am not sure if they ever were very active in the space, but I viewed them as competitor in 2001.
  • Elata - Company based in England. I am not sure what happened to them
  • Sicap - One of the first solutions based on USSD technology. I am also not sure what happened here
  • Vallista - What happened to Vallista? I have not heard from them for some time now.
It would be interesting to learn more about the people that created these pioneering companies and what they do now.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

This is very interesting. I actually did the same thing for our company and realised that we moved from pioneering enterprise systems development locally to outsourcing and managed services. All our competition at that time are now totally non-existent. A lot has changed in 10 years and we learned a lot from Andy Grove of Intel's book "Only the paranoid survive" and adapted to our environment. Lets hope that Mobile Banking becomes another one of those "disruptive technologies" Mr Grove predicted and we are on the right side of technology in our environment this time.

andreascon said...

Hannes,

Elata got acquired by Qualcomm long time ago. It powers their OTA content and app delivery for BREW

Sicap acquired Swapcom is one of the leading MDM vendors, esp. in Europe.

Andreas

Anonymous said...

Vallista merged with (was acquired by) Aepona in 2009 and is now a leading provider of payments/settlement solutions.