New merged company employs 600 and covers Europe, Asia, Africa and LatAm.
India's IMImobile has been locked in negotiations to buy its UK target for most of 2010, with the deal slowed by a few hardball-playing shareholders and the emergence in the late summer of MIG/ECI with a counter offer.
But it saw them all off to buy 100 per cent of WIN and thereby create a formidable new presence in the mobile VAS delivery space.
It's easy to see the logic: IMImobile is a major player in the Indian market, where it has strong operator relationships and an impressive record in delivering ringbacks, advertising services, messaging and social media. It also has a pan-African deal in place with MTN.
But it's only just getting going in Europe and the UK, where WINplc is well-established thanks to high-profile deals with BBC, ITN, O2 and others. WINplc is also strong in the enterprise space,
So now, the new company will refine IMImobile's DaVinci 'evolved service platform' to build on existing deals and find new ones.
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Vishwanath Alluri, CEO of IMImobile said of the deal: “This is an important step for IMImobile as we aim to create and drive an open global mobile marketplace for new applications and services and to help operators realize the “network-as-a-service” model and make their networks smarter.”
WIN's former CEO, Graham Rivers, who becomes an executive director of IMImobile, added: “In IMImobile we have found the perfect match to realise the ambitions we held for WIN’s business globally.
"They bring scale, reach, technical excellence and diversity to the WIN proposition in Europe and beyond. In turn, we can help IMI with its European and global ambitions."
Another interesting angle for the new IMImobile will be its role in helping operators monetise their various API-based initiatives such as OneAPI and the Wholesale Application Community.
It believes there's an opportunity to let any enterprise sell products itself using operator billing and targeting.
