Other than banks, the telecom sector has seen the maximum domestic IT
investment in the country. On the software front alone, according to Voice &
Data estimates, the investment in 2002-03 was Rs 1,430 crore with the market
expected to grow by more than 20% this fiscal. The fast pace of deregulation of
the telecom sector together with quick roll-out of wireless network in the
country have generated tremendous demand for telecom software across the
physical layer, from switches to the enterprise level. Even on the hardware
front, the growth has been phenomenal, especially since every telecom equipment
require IT support at the back end for their smooth functioning.
As more and more service providers got into the market and rapidly expanded
their services, the demand for OSS/BSS and network management tools has grown
exponentially. The country is already witnessing a pitched battle fought between
the bigger service providers like Reliance, Bharti, BSNL, Tata Indicom, Idea
Cellular and Hutch.
Telcos
Will Spend On...
Network
management tools
OSS/BSS
solutions
BIsuites
Churn
and fraud management solutions
Network
storage solutions
To sustain themselves in the highly competitive market, these companies need
to invest in infrastructure, improve quality of service, network efficiency and
billing solutions. And these are precisely the factors driving the adoption of
IT in the domestic market.
Agrees Arvind Pandey, vice president—Information Services, Hutchison Essar
Telecom Ltd, "The main role of IT would be to enable us to provide the
right kind of information to our customers and to support the necessary level of
infrastructure that would help us in doing so." Adds Pandey,
"Introduction of WLL or the interconnect regime forced us to suddenly make
necessary changes in our IT systems at an absolutely priority basis."
Most telecom service providers today, recognize Business Intelligence tools
as a strategic IT investment and look for enterprise BI suites that serve the
needs of multiple types of users.
Says Alok Kumar, GM & Head-IT, Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Ltd.,
"For telecom service providers, it is imperative to understand the reasons
for consumer churn and contain them. One of the key deterrents to churn is
effective customer service."
For this, it becomes necessary to have solutions in place, for registering
customer data, studying and analyzing behavior and spending patterns to predict
the propensity to churn and enable the players to effectively address issues and
increase customer loyalty and retention.
Another catalyst, driving the usage of IT in this sector, is the growing
realization amongst service providers about utilizing data services. Eventually,
data ARPU would cross a dwindling voice ARPU and for different data applications
to be developed and maintained, increasing adoption of IT is inevitable.
The best example is Reliance Infocomm, who are about to unveil a slew of both
enterprise and consumer data applications. Says Lalit Sawhney, senior VP,
Reliance Infocomm, "Many of these applications are closely integrated with
IT applications; besides the entire development being done on IT platforms
only." For example, a CIO of a carrier has to decide on whether to continue
to use J2ME as a development platform or whether to go for BREW from Qualcomm.
Networked storage has been one area where the telecom vertical is witnessing
massive upheaval. Most of the bigger telcos implanted SAN solutions during
2003-04, since addition in their subscriber base necessitated migrating to a
faster and more reliable mode of storage. With fiber channel proving to be
expensive, Kumar feels there is an increasing possibility of IP SANs hogging the
limelight in the telecom space. Storage adoption in telecom was not merely
restricted to SAN implementation, but also involved storage virtualization.
But, the IT adoption rate in the Indian telecom sector is getting
increasingly skewed towards the service providers. Not only the large cellular
carriers, even fixed line carriers and ISPs like Sify and Data Access are not
lagging behind in investing on IT. However, OEMs are getting increasingly
sidelined in their quota of IT usage. On the OEM side, carriers are not excited
by new technologies like 3G and GPRS, as they are yet to mature as estimated
earlier and are not yet widely deployed in the mass level.
