Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 1)

Business professionals rely heavily on their companies’ IT departments, and the larger the company, the larger the demand. Fortunately, there are companies like Axios Systems that have developed ways to make IT service management for medium to large enterprises easier and more efficient. Founded in 1988 by Tasos Symeonides, Axios remains a privately owned company operated by the Symeonides family. The company has acquired a global clientele, has headquarters in the United States and the United Kingdom, and stands at $50 million in revenue at the time of this interview.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Markos. Let’s start with some background about you and Axios Systems. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Diarmuid Mallon, Head of Product Marketing for Sybase, an SAP Company, on Mobile Banking (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: And most of it goes into the garbage.

Diarmuid Mallon: At best. Maybe they just get something from the headquarters of the store. They have no insight. Those vouchers sell products but gain no customer insight. So, we’ve been working with some consumer product companies and have found interesting ways to use mobile as a way of providing that customer insight. Closely linked to that is the whole point of loyalty as well. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Diarmuid Mallon, Head of Product Marketing for Sybase, an SAP Company, on Mobile Banking (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the operators and the banks have a synergistic situation in most of these regions. Each of them is trying to reach the same customers. In fact, for the cellular operators, if they say that by buying a cellular phone you can also get into the cellular banking system, that’s another value proposition, another case for buying the cell phone beyond being a communication device, right?

Diarmuid Mallon: Absolutely, yes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Diarmuid Mallon, Head of Product Marketing for Sybase, an SAP Company, on Mobile Banking (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Right. I think we understand the benefits. Would you talk about how banks are doing it? What is the architecture of the solution? How does the money flow?

Diarmuid Mallon: What’s being done is that there’s a commerce platform deployed on mobile. Traditionally, when people talk about mobile banking, what they’re talking about is an app on the phone that interacts with core banking, perhaps through the ATM network. It dips into core banking and pulls out your balance or dips into core banking and perhaps looks at some pre-defined bill-pay destinations you’ve set up and allows you to send to those and, potentially, lets you send money between people. But it’s all based upon dipping into core banking and into an existing account. How do you get into those accounts? You have to be set up in core banking. All of the business processes are based on step one: a person walks into the branch. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Diarmuid Mallon, Head of Product Marketing for Sybase, an SAP Company, on Mobile Banking (Part 1)

People can use their mobile phones to do just about anything these days, including personal banking. Founded in Berkeley, California, in 1984 by Mark Hoffman and Bob Epstein, Sybase started out as a company that provided enterprise infrastructure and mobile software until it acquired Mobile 365, Inc. in 2006.  The acquisition of Mobile 365 introduced Sybase to the world of SMS. Acquired for $5.8 billion by business software provider SAP in May 2010, by the end of September 2010, the company’s Sybase 365 had delivered more than one trillion messages. That’s equal to about 32,000 messages a second for one year. Although the company continues to provide services in other areas, Sybase continues to thrive in the mobile space.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Diarmuid. Let’s start with some background about you and the group in Sybase that you work with. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 9)

Sramana Mitra: But Google doesn’t have access to Facebook’s algorithms. So, what Facebook is doing is not what Google or Bing has access to. They can’t use that data to do their optimization.

Frank Dale: That’s right with Google. What Google is typically looking at is what’s going on on things like Google+. They’re also looking at things like Twitter data. They’ve had access to that stream for a long time. They’re looking at who is sharing certain things, who responds to particular content, and who links to it. The master of search engine optimization is a man named Rand Fishkin who’s just an outstanding human being. He’ll tell you any time you talk to him is that one of the things Google really wants to is understand who’s an authoritative person on certain topics. It’s already been done with websites by taking a look at who links to whom and taking a set of seeded lists of websites. Like, getting a link from CNN.com is a lot more credible than getting a link from the town newspaper. Google’s starting to apply that to human beings. Where does a person write? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 8)

SM: Their starting prices are $1,000 or $2,000 a month.

FD: That’s pretty common in that space, and certainly with a company like Marketo or Eloqua, you’re looking at a mid-market enterprise level tool. If I were going to look for something like that, to unify that a little bit, I’m probably going to look at a company like Pardot. I tend to do better with smaller players.

SM: What’s the name of the company? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 7)

Frank Dale: Let me make sure I’m with on this. When you’re running these contests, are you initially acquiring the leads through the partners?

Sramana Mitra: No. We have a registration page on Eventbrite. Because we already have a large footprint plus other partners publicizing the events, people register for the events. Each session we collect a chunk of leads, and then those leads need to be moved from Eventbrite to our email marketing system, which is aWeber. AWeber will not allow us to put these leads in without double confirmation. They will have us add the leads, then they will send us a confirmation message. For most people, these emails get lost in their trash cans. >>>