( Some parts of this post may not be totally accurate, I got the info from google and a senior Sonim employee)
” Sonim Technologies (www.sonimtech.com) was founded somewhere between 1999-2000, with a vision to provide Push-to-Talk (PTT) platform over VOIP over major phones. The market was large enterprise sales force which can use PTT to call any colleague. The fund size raised was about $80M. “
The company hired the best talent in VOIP and mobile platform. It spent almost 3 year, building a state-of-the-art VOIP platform. The main challenge was low bandwidth and computation power available to mobiles (back then). They finally launched an almost perfect PTT solution in 2003-2004.
Almost same time or an year later, other phone vendors like Nokia and Skype came up with alternate technologies to achieve the same 🙁
Sonim tried the best to sell this stuff to enterprises and changed the CEO twice … no luck. They started selling handhelds bundled with their PTT stack … no luck.
Finally they got a break with a large healthcare firm in 2005-06 and started selling two-way VOIP communication stack in PTT solution (skype and Nokia are one-way on mobiles). They made some decent money (between 2-5M).
Then the Sonim product management started asking the customers some “must have” features and got one more prominent reply – ruggedness.
In the next handset, they rubber padded the entire circuit and body … and to their shock and serprise the phone started selling only because of its ruggedness !!! Now they have exhausted almost 80M, dumped PTT stack (as primary feature), rebranded the website … and selling just – Rugged Mobiles 🙂
Moral of Story –
- Test the market well, before you start …
- Build dirty build fast
- Ask your customers …. and be open for change
- Be persistent and patient
- India’s Hottest Startups - September 7, 2008
- The case of SonimTech – And lessons we can learn - August 23, 2008
- The Druvaa Story – III - July 14, 2008
folks,
my name is bob plaschke and i am the current CEO of sonim :-). thanks much for the kind and accurate words, you’ve got the story pretty much right. a few hopefully helpful clarifications
a. it was a security firm that we sold the first ptt enabled handsets, they did not pay us 2-5million 😉
b. we are actively using our IP based services in our phones. We’re focused on people who work and play in extreme environments and as such we’ve about to rollout services we think that are useful for people out in dangerous situations typically alone (think of push to help)
finally, i personally think the most important change for us to get to where we are today (profitable) is to focus
thanks again for the thinking here, really interesting
Very well summarized Gomu.
Yes, evolution is the name of the game. This show true spirit of survival.
There is a market for PTT solution. You can see police, city taxi, security, construction workers, etc all carrying bulky walky-talkies. PTT is an efficient replacement of that outdated technology. And Sonim is the first and so far the only end-to-end commercial deployment of OMA standard PoC. As you can see on their website, they have extended the PoC standards to provide a lot of convenient features. Also, they are constantly doing Inter-Operability-Tests with Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, Nortel, Motorola, etc who provide IMS, PoC servers, clients, etc. The fact that so many big companies are keeping abreast of the technology is an indication that there is a market.
So where is the problem? The network. Currently operators have not allocated enough bandwidth for GPRS. So there are some delay problems on some networks. Where there is enough GPRS bandwidth allocated, Sonim’s PTT is a grand success, like in networks in UK, France, South Africa, etc., where the performance is very good. On UMTS the solution has been tested for excellent performance. As more networks are moving towards 3G, OMA PoC will come back as a major technology. It may even be the first end-to-end solution on 3G. Already Sonim has tested OMA PoC to work very well on WiMax networks where Skype has not worked all that well.
And, as the article and the following comments indicate, Sonim has shown remarkable agility in being flexible to the market and other conditions. Finally what matters is value for investor’s money and satisfaction of customers, right?
Good post — to-the-point and facts-based (apparently, atleast).
I wonder what really happened to the best brains in VoIP/Mobile technology that the company hired ? From purely (or largely) VoIP Software expertise base, the company seems to have moved to hardware ruggedization expertise. As Ari says, this must have been a very painful process.
cheers,
Banibrata
Agreed. I can only say that when you start out for point A, very often you end up going to point B instead. In the case of one of our companies, the original concept (though good and valid) has been experiencing a lot if issues due to various externalities, and thus we have had to seriously shift strategy and focus do delivering something of value to the same target customers but in a different way and while listening to what they want. This can be a painful process (change, re-tooling) and lengthy, but there is often no alternative if you want to survive (and at the end of the day, it is less about the original idea but more aout giving your investors a return on their money – “that” should be your focus) – much like the case of this company mentioned.
Good luck to all!