Focus On: Tira Wireless' Paul Schaut

The mobile space is booming. It's the wild west frontier of the videogames industry right now, with revenues climbing fast, market projections looking uniformly optimistic, consolidation between key companies rife, IPOs beginning to filter through and technology accelerating forward at a rate of knots. Everything is left to play for, with the major players of the industry still emerging and establishing their positions. It's an exciting time to be in mobile.

One major speed-bump continues to vex even the top companies in the industry, however, and has threatened to make the market inaccessible to smaller players. That issue is fragmentation; the obvious but, for developers and publishers, infuriating need to port every game to an arsenal of literally hundreds of incompatible handsets and different operator requirements.

"Whether you're a 3D chip provider or the company that integrates the 3D chip, everybody is trying to differentiate themselves through innovation and because we don't have a Wintel type of scenario in this marketplace, that innovation can't be controlled by a single vendor - so it's innovation run amok, in a way," explains Paul Schaut, CEO of Tira Wireless, a company which has just launched what it believes is the best solution yet to the fragmentation issue. "That's a good thing; it's a good thing for the market because you'll continue to get more powerful, capable devices, and it's a good thing for Tira, because we're solving that problem."

Jumping the Problem

The solution Tira has come up with is the Tira Jump Product Suite, and is a technology offering that builds on the firm's experience of porting hundreds of Java titles to different mobile devices for clients including some of the world's biggest mobile content publishers and developers. "From Tira's perspective, that's been our business now for three years," Schaut says. "We recognise the dynamics of this problem and we are the first and only company to address the problem from a technological perspective by automating the porting process."

The company was originally a mobile publisher and developer itself, but recognised the opportunity that existed in the porting market and in 2004, sold off its publishing business in order to focus exclusively on that area. The porting business started to seriously take off in the first half of 2004, to the extent that, according to Schaut, "the queue for Tira got to be longer than customers would tolerate."

"We had to recognise that the demand we had for our services certainly exceeded our capacity," he says. "That just reinforced that the way for us as a business to scale is to allow others to use the technology themselves, so we are going to cap or manage our services business to basically stay flat, and take the demand that has been coming at us and direct that to product revenues. We have cooked up the technology that we use ourselves to a point where we are comfortable one, that there's a market, two, that there's value that we provide, and three, that it's ready for commercial availability - that's why we've released it."

"To summarise the value of the experience that we have to the technology, we have ported close to 5000 ports now," he explains, "which is more applications written by more publishers and more developers, across more networks and devices and languages, than anybody else in the world. Every time we do a port, we are learning from that experience, in that we have different developers writing differently to the APIs, different handset manufacturers, different standards apppearing in the market, different operators with different curveballs in the sense of what they want to drive to the market... So every time we take a new app written by a different developer and run it across a new network or a new device, we learn, and that learning is captured in our technology."

Three-Piece Suite

"The Jump technology itself is pretty simple in a sense," according to Schaut. "It's much harder to build than it is to describe, which is why I'm a CEO coming out of sales as opposed to an engineer! The concept is that you start with a reference build for an application onto a Nokia Series 40 or a Nokia Series 60, and through our patent pending technology we generate the multiple builds for the specific languages, devices and operator requirements that exist within the fragmentation stack."

"The simple concept is that the person who's using the Jump engine doesn't need to know the application, and doesn't need to know the 150 to 200 devices you might be targeting. That's a unique approach, as opposed to the current approach which is a manual porting effort by either a porting shop or a developer who wrote the application himself and then is trying to keep up with all the different devices and manually porting the application to each device."

"We do that through what's called the Tira Jump Product Suite, which has three different modules - the developer desktop, which is an Eclipse plug-in that allows the developer to work in a familiar environment, the workflow manager, and the transformation engine. The transformation engine has been in business at Tira, working for us for the last two years; the workflow manager and the developer desktop we've been working with for the last couple of quarters, and we're commercialising all three as a suite."

"We ourselves, as a service provider, don't just use the transformation engine. There will always be a human aspect to porting and to quality assurance of a port; you need that interaction of QA and porting. The work order, the task management, the pieces that are required to complete a port and the reporting on where you're at in the various projects that you have is what's addressed by the workflow manager."

"The transformation engine is the secret sauce. It's made up of a series of libraries, plug-ins for devices, plug-ins for operators. When a new device comes out, we profile it and build a plug-in - that takes us two or three days to do, and we look at it from every angle you can imagine. Once we've profiled that device, every Jump user that has access to the transformation engine gets the benefit of that knowledge, so it's a great win for everybody using the engine."

Business Punchline

The technology may be impressive, but of course, what publishers really want to hear is the bottom line with regard to the cost savings associated with it - and in that respect, Tira is convinced that it has a hugely appealing offering. "The punchline, from a business and financial perspective, is that by semi-automating the process of developing, porting, localisation, managing the process and then certification, you bring the time and therefore the costs down," explains Schaut.

"Average numbers are hard to use in such a fragmented marketplace, but we believe that for the 'average' game, a manual porting effort would take 40 man-hours, while using out technology would bring that down to 15. Using a simplistic model, once you compare those hours, and the average fees associated with doing a Tira build, we save $675 per port - which is a significant number when you consider that even a medium sized publisher might do 2000 builds a year. That's $1.3 million dollar savings."

The advantages of using Tira Jump don't stop at cost, though. "The bigger win, and bigger revenue opportunity, is the time to market gained by completing the port much quicker using technology versus a manual effort," according to Schaut. "You can save time by doing it quicker, and the speed is also impacted by the number of times that you need to go back and forth with the engineers or even with the operators with their certification process. When you've automated this process, you're ensured a higher quality product, and more reliable product, and you can get your time to market down significantly."

"There's also a qualitative aspect of the value here - in fact, that's the one that is resonating the most with the bigger publishers that are either current customers of ours that use our services, or prospective customers," he continues. "One of the areas of value that jumps out is again related to quality and predictability; technology versus manual porting provides a more predictable, higher quality output. That's a value that it's tough to place a value on, but every business person that we talk to sees that as the biggest benefit - the control over the quality that they produce in their applications and in the brands that they associate with those applications, and the control over prioritising when they take on which projects, when they reach different operators and the required levels of performance and quality for those. The quality and control aspects that we introduce through our technology are the two single most influential business decision makers to publishers of major brands."

Jumping Forwards

In terms of the market for this type of product, Schaut believes that an enormous opportunity exists for Tira - and that it will only grow in the coming years, as the fragmentation issue continues to be a major factor in the process of publishing games and applications on mobile devices.

"The market for porting is driven by the fragmentation issue, and we think it's a big market," he says. "Market research valued the mobile sector at $1.4 billion in 2004, growing to $6.6 billion in 2010, for all games on mobile devices worldwide. It's a big market - consumers have an appetite for games, and the industry will keep addressing that appetite with more and more products. The cost to build a game in the mobile app space is relatively small compared to the console sector, but what we've seen is that the cost to port that game across to various devices is one and a half to two times the cost of actually building the original app."

"For our future models, though, we've used a one to one ratio - I think that development costs are going to go up as the technologies and the sophistication of the applications goes up, and I think that the porting costs will go down as more and more customers use us, because that's one of the benefits, more efficient porting costs. Between those two, I think that one to one is a fair ratio. The cost of developing a game is about 15 per cent of a publisher's revenue split, and that puts the porting costs at 15 per cent as well in 2010. 15 per cent of a $6.6 billion dollar market is a billion dollar market opportunity for porting products and services. We feel very strongly that the market supports those numbers - this is a billion dollar opportunity."

Of course, there have been some efforts within the industry to try and reduce the fragmentation problem by introducing widespread standards - but Schaut doesn't believe that those initiatives are going to make a meaningful difference any time soon. "In terms of fragmentation, I think the punchline is that the industry approaches to fragmentation will have an impact, but it'll be slow and less helpful than the evangelists believe it will be," he says. "It'll make slow and steady progress over the years to come - but as that progress is made for some aspects of the fragmentation stack, there will be a continued series of innovative technological waves that will add to the fragmentation during that same time period."

"We think that fragmentation is going to get worse, in fact, both in terms of the device itself, because of applications becoming more sophisticated, and because of the concept of duelling vendors - the situation where the operators, the software providers and the hardware makers themselves are all trying to scramble for market share. There's no expectation of a group of operators or a group of handset manufacturers coming out of a bar one night singing Kum Bai Yah and agreeing to a commodity specification that everyone will adhere to. They have vested interests, in fact, in not solving this problem; you won't hear them say that publicly, but I think there are business drivers that mean that we'll continue to see fragmentation."

Jump Around

Tira's offering addresses the most commonly voiced complaint from within the mobile sector, and it certainly seems like a product that the market has been crying out for. Unsurprisingly, then, Schaut says that the company has seen a hugely positive reaction to the Jump Product Suite - and its associated partner network which sees a number of services firms such as Babel Media offering porting services using the Jump technology -from executives all around the industry.

"We've had some of the most senior managers and senior technologists spend a lot of time with us and look under the hood of the technology, and one hundred per cent of the time the message back is that we're unique, nobody else is doing what we've done, and they're amazed at what we've done," Schaut enthuses. "They all want to talk about how to embrace this type of approach for their portfolio. It's very exciting."