Telefónica launches FonYou app in Spain

Spanish cloud telephony provider FonYou has announced that its XtraLine solution is now available to mobile operators as a white-labelled iOS and Android app. Spanish incumbent Telefónica is the first carrier to launch the app. The solution, which was deployed in a trial earlier this year by Telefónica, enables mobile operators to provide consumers with a second phone line bundled with a range of rich services like visual voicemail, call registers and advanced voice screening.

The services are also accessible to carrier customers through an online interface, with FonYou positioning its offering as a retention and differentiation tool for operators in the face of increased competition and the threat from OTT services such as Google Voice. “As long as the competition from external sources increases, operators will look to advanced services,” said FonYou CEO Fernando Núñez-Mendoza, stressing the differentiation between the FonYou offering and OTT solutions.

“Users can now effectively download a new number from Telefónica and get high quality, conventional switched voice and text, not VoIP,” he said.

FonYou has a long-standing relationship with Telefónica but Núñez-Mendoza said the firm planned to announce further partnerships in 2012. He hinted that mid-sized operators would be likely partners. “The initiatives that we see that are quick and courageous are coming form the mid-sized operators,” he said. “The large ones need a lot of time and processes to make decisions. That’s bad news for them; they have still not re-engineered the innovation process.”

Telefónica has made prominent its intentions to take the OTT players on in the market and is perhaps not typical of the large operator, Núñez-Mendoza said. That partnership is restricted to Spain at the moment and perhaps one of the most effective measures of success for the FonYou offering will be wether and how quickly Telefónica looks to take it to the other markets in which it operates.