Charbel Litany and the nine-month wait

Nine months is a curious amount of time to wait for a telephone service. The idea can be ready. The customer can be ready. Somewhere between the two, a procession of agreements, assessments and integrations must have its turn. In 2018, Charbel Litany put that delay at the centre of his pitch for Apollo, a platform from InMobiles. His proposed timetable for launching a service after the infrastructure was in place: two days to one week.

It was a wonderfully specific complaint. Telecom conferences accommodate plenty of talk about the future; Litany had arrived with an argument about the calendar. The founder and CEO of InMobiles Holding was asking operators to reconsider how new services reached their networks, and how much work had to be repeated along the way. His public career connects several versions of that question: a free consumer app, tools for developers, software for regulators and a cloud platform launched with a Pakistani operator.

A free app with a second audience

Litany’s early business was rooted in Beirut. By March 2012, he described an operation of 80 people supplying telecom operators and banks, with working beginnings in 2003. The company’s later corporate history dates its establishment to 2006. The earlier account places him inside the Lebanese software business before smartphones had made apps an everyday shopping category.

At the end of 2011, InMobiles tried something different. It released whozcalling, a free app aimed directly at users. The app spread quickly in the following weeks. For a supplier accustomed to selling to institutions, putting a product into individual hands changed who got to judge the work.

Litany also had an institutional audience in mind. He wanted operators to consider their own app stores, and to take a larger role in services delivered on the device. The free app served as a demonstration. At that stage, InMobiles was leaving it unmonetized while using it to make the commercial argument to operators.

There is a pleasing salesman's twist here: the people downloading the app were customers of a product that was also making a pitch to someone else. A useful demonstration could travel further than a presentation.

Boston, with Beirut in the room

In September 2016, Litany joined Endeavor’s entrepreneur network after its international selection panel in Boston. The gathering selected 34 entrepreneurs representing 18 companies from 12 countries. InMobiles appeared in the Lebanon group, alongside Band Industries, the music technology business behind the Roadie Tuner.

His company arrived with a business built around software for operators and government customers in the Middle East and Africa. Its work included mobile messaging, call completion, virtual numbers and social telephony. That range helps explain why a founder selling infrastructure might also be interested in the behaviour of somebody holding a phone.

The selection process involved interviews with international business leaders and deliberations about the companies’ growth prospects. Membership brought access to mentors and other business support. For Litany, this placed an operator-facing telecom business in a network organised around entrepreneurship across industries.

The company’s products addressed a particular commercial concern: operators wanted additional revenue as mobile use changed. His answer involved finding more things those networks could do. Much of that work happened behind services whose users would have little reason to learn their supplier’s name.

Apollo takes aim at the waiting room

When Apollo appeared at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2018, Litany gave it an unusually theatrical introduction: “Apollo will shock everyone.” The product beneath that flourish dealt with the practical business of connecting services to an operator’s network.

Apollo was designed as a shared gateway. Its Core layer connected to network elements; a second layer, Connect, sat above it. Developers would work through the platform. With that groundwork completed, a new service could move through integration and user acceptance testing without repeating the entire earlier process.

Litany described a launch sequence that could consume at least nine months. Legal agreements, commercial discussions and security assessments preceded technical integration and testing. Apollo’s promise depended on having the underlying platform delivered and integrated first. The shorter window was his stated expectation for subsequent service launches.

That distinction matters to the business argument. A platform earns its keep through repeated use. An operator that buys the groundwork once can then bring in services from different developers. Litany was proposing a different purchasing arrangement as well as a different technical arrangement, with less dependence on a single service vendor.

Let the developer through

The follow-on idea was iGrow, a collaboration platform powered by Apollo. It gave the developer a more visible part in Litany’s telecom proposition. Startups could build communications applications; operators could offer those services to their customers through their existing networks.

The examples were concrete. A developer might supply an SMS-enabled business application, or build a service involving voice and video. Apollo’s interfaces and visual tools were presented as ways to make that work easier. The operator would retain the network traffic while gaining another service to offer.

Litany’s ambition extended to training. At Apollo’s introduction, he discussed using it as an academic platform so startups and developers could learn to build services for the operator market. Access to network capabilities was part of the appeal. The opportunity required a route into an industry with its own technical and commercial procedures.

Seen beside the earlier consumer app, iGrow reveals a recurring interest in who gets to participate. In one case, an app demonstrated what operators might offer on a handset. In the other, a platform invited outside developers to supply the services. Each proposal asked the operator to work with a wider circle.

The phone has to belong on the network

Another part of Litany’s business dealt with a less cheerful question: whether a handset should be admitted to a network at all. In 2018, InMobiles described its Mobile Identity Registration System, MIRS, working with Lebanon’s telecommunications ministry and the local operators Alfa and Touch.

The system used device identifiers to support checks on phones and their compliance. The company described tools intended to address counterfeit, stolen and noncompliant handsets, alongside the administration of imports and customs duties. Subscribers could check information about a device through text messages and a ministry website.

For a founder interested in connecting more services, this was the complementary task of deciding what could connect legitimately. An operator needs ways to admit customers, recognise equipment and enforce the rules that apply to its network. The work reaches beyond the sale of a clever application.

Litany’s own response to the MIRS work was more exuberant than the subject’s administrative vocabulary. In a public post, he thanked the “InMobiles FAMILY” and told them to keep their heads up. The capitals supplied their own applause. The credit, in that message, went to the team.

January in Islamabad

On January 10, 2023, InMobiles and Jazz launched a VAS Cloud solution at the Islamabad Marriott Hotel. The announcement marked a decade of partnership. Jazz was a substantial setting for the work: at the time, the launch announcement described an operator with more than 75 million subscribers across Pakistan.

VAS means value-added services, an unromantic name for a broad commercial territory. The platform brought together service management, products, operations, campaigns, partner onboarding and content integration. Those are the tasks that turn a proposed service into something an operator can actually offer and run.

The connection with Litany’s earlier pitch is easy to see. Apollo concerned the work required to introduce services. iGrow concerned the developers who could create them. VAS Cloud gathered more of the ongoing commercial and operational work around those services into one offering.

A decade-long relationship also gives the story a different tempo from the conference launch. Software can be announced in an afternoon. A working relationship has to survive subsequent implementations, changing requirements and the ordinary business of delivery. Here was an existing customer relationship providing the setting for another product launch.

“Launching the service will only take two days to one week.”

Charbel Litany, describing Apollo in 2018

Keeping the door open

Litany’s connection with developers also has an institutional expression. Antonine University lists him on the advisory board of its Department of Computer and Communications Engineering, identifying him as InMobiles’ founder and CEO. Other listed members come from telecom, technology businesses and research. It places his commercial experience beside the education of future practitioners.

At InMobiles, the service-delivery question remained visible in January 2024. The company described a centralized platform combining partner onboarding, content handling and payment functions. Its proposed billing options included individual purchases and subscriptions. The familiar concern was how to assemble services and make them usable within an operator’s business.

By its February 2024 MWC announcement, the portfolio also included digital payments regulation, energy optimization and AI-powered customer experience products. InMobiles called that its fourteenth appearance at the Barcelona event. The calendar had accumulated plenty of return visits since Apollo’s introduction.

Based in Dubai, Litany continues to lead a business whose work crosses national markets and the boundary between a network and its users. His career offers a particular view of entrepreneurship: an app can be a demonstration, a gateway can change who gets to build, and a longstanding operator relationship can become the place to try the next service. Through those different products runs the same practical question. Once the idea is ready, what still stands between it and the person holding the phone?