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Further launches are due in March and June 2001 and will encompass location-based billing, location-based emergency services, dispatch services and information services, according to Tommy Drummond, E-blana's Sales and Marketing Director.
Location-based billing will allow mobile operators to offer different price ranges depending on location, e.g. 10 percent cheaper calls than those from land lines when the user is at home, while information services will include positioning systems, maps, and 'buddy lists'.
"We will be releasing an application infrastructure on which people can roll out real business applications in a wireless environment," Drummond told ElectricNews.Net. "Location-based services is the vision direction where we're going, that's what we're investing in."
Drummond added that the company will continue to serve its large blue-chip client base in Ireland which is based on intranet and extranets for banking and government, as that is still its core business.
The E-blana enterprise group was launched only last month and united a number of companies, including Exselan Computer Systems, The Facility Management Workshop, and Gemini.
"The mix of companies means we have a lot of the core competencies to pull together," said Drummond. "Although we don't envisage a lot of the location-based stuff happening until the infrastructure is in place in six to nine months' time. There's massive change within the device level and the operating system level at the moment."
The industry isn't at a mature stage of settlement yet and relationships are being formed and broken all the time, he said. Nevertheless, E-blana is in partnership talks with telco operators and vendors, including Eircell, BT, Ericsson and Nokia, to discover where they're going and what their timelines are, Drummond claimed.
An E-blana team have been developing location-based services over the last two months, but the company will hire a further four or five people for their main development centre in Dundalk in January.
"The market is at a very interesting stage at this point in time, although at the moment it looks clustered," Drummond concluded. "A lot of clarity will come into this market in the next few months."
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