Irish mobile service provider Selatra recently signed a deal with O2 Ireland to manage its games portal.

Just the right time to catch with CEO Fergal O'Callaghan for a chat about what's going on in the world of mobile content fulfillment.

Pocket Gamer: Can you give us some background on what Selatra does?

Fergal O'Callaghan: We used to be a pure aggregator of mobile games but we've always offered technology services too, where we would provide games Over The Air to off-deck portals.

Over the last 12 months, we've extended that offering by adding a front-end to existing elements such as the context management system we've used internally to manage our distribution.

What we've found is our experience in managing a large volume of content has enabled us to provide a compelling offering to network operators.

What's operators' view of outsourcing?

A lot of them are looking for games experts. There is a recession on and there are cutbacks happening in the operator space and outsourcing is a simple way for them to manage their costs. That's why our offering has gathered momentum.

Also, we enable operators to sell more games.

Instead of handling administrative tasks and uploading games to servers, the operators can think about how to get the best sales out of the games on their deck. We handle the tedious workload and free up their time.

How does your technology integrate into the operators'?

We host the web and WAP sites and integrate with their billing system and take over the day-to-day administration. Typically we're handling the requests from the consumer and providing them with a URL link and they will download the binary from our platform. We can directly distribute binaries when we're not providing a fully managed service too.

What's the state of play in mobile games aggregation?

The rate of production of mobile games has definitely decreased over the past couple of years. Partly this is because a lot of companies have gone out of business, or switched to other platforms, but the rate had to decrease as the market matured.

For one thing, the number of devices you have to support with Java has increased exponentially. And, the market couldn't handle the number of games that were being produced.

You don't need a 100 new games a month to run a deck.

Finally, how is the rise of smartphones and app stores changing the mobile market?

For general mobile, the idea of an app is a new concept, and one that appeals to a wide range of people in term of customisation. Things like Apple's iPhone and iPod touch TV ads have also highlighted what apps are all about.

We're seeing a lot of downloads of apps, but while we can support Symbian and Windows Mobile, the bulk of our business remains Java.

Thanks to Fergal for his time

You can find out more about Selatra via its website.