So we targeted several incumbents and major mobile carriers one at a time methodologically, always making sure we did not overextend ourselves or inflate our costs of sale. Basically we tried in each case to identify what the given carrier needed most in his particular situation. The strategy worked.
In the first 5 years of our company, most of our customers were in fixed-line communications, so to move into mobile communications we concentrated on the biggest mobile carrier in Europe, Vodafone D2 in Germany. And we chose a completely new value-added service which at that time had never been launched in Europe: Ring Back Tone (RBT). Vodafone launched RBT in 2003 as the first mobile carrier in Europe and ECT went on to become one of the largest vendors of solutions for RBT worldwide.
Being a German company, one of our chief goals in the first years of our company was to have Deutsche Telekom as a customer. In 2004, we received our first tender from Deutsche Telekom. One of their most profitable voice value-added services, televoting, needed to be migrated from an older platform to a more innovative solution capable of providing IVR to thousands of calls per second. Fighting against stiff competition from the largest vendors of telecommunications solutions, we won this tender and implemented the biggest and most feature rich televoting solution worldwide. In the years since, Deutsche Telekom has remained one of our most important customers, investing more than 10 million Euros in ECT technology.
