Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Monday, Jul 09, 2007
ePaper
Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Monday, Jul 09, 2007 ePaper |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
eWorld
-
Interview Info-Tech - Mergers & Acquisitions Taking the India call
“A mere 34 per cent of service providers can introduce new services in less than six months.”
Seth Nesbitt
V. Rishi Kumar As the global telecom industry witnesses mergers and acquisitions, companies are faced with the challenge of integrating diverse technology systems and services. Amdocs, a $2.48-billion technology services provider that operates out of 50 countries, offers telecom carriers operation and business support. The company has a development centre with over 2,000 people and business services team in India. Its Vice-President, Seth Nesbitt, provides insight into the company’s moves here and industry trends in the making. Excerpts from the interview. What are Amdocs’ plans for India? India is of strategic importance to Amdocs, both from an employee and customer standpoint. The company is committed to a global sourcing strategy. In our endeavour to source the best talent from around the globe, we have development centres in Brazil, Canada, China, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, the US and the UK. Our Pune development centre, started in 2004, has 2,000 employees. It works on projects for some of the biggest service providers world-wide on product development, delivery and customer support. We have an established clientele in India, including VSNL, TTSL and SmartTrust. With the success of the first development centre in India and keeping in mind the rapidly growing talent pool in the country, Amdocs has decided to expand its India presence and open a second development centre in Gurgaon, targeted to employ approximately 1,000 people. With the unprecedented growth in the telecom sector, India has emerged as a potential market. Amdocs is pursuing the Operation Support Systems/Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) market. Having acquired Cramer (a leading OSS vendor) in 2005, we offer the broadest portfolio of products and services across the OSS and BSS market today, and are targeting the Indian communications market that is at a nascent stage in terms of these deployments. On trends unfolding in the Indian market… India is one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world with the mobile phone subscriber base alone growing at a rate of 82.2 per cent per annum. The mobile sector has grown from 10 million subscribers in 2002 to 150 million in 2007. Across the mobile, fixed, broadband and Internet spaces, users are growing. As at June 2007, the subscriber base is 212 million and the region has a teledensity of 18.7 per cent. While Indian players have consolidated their position in the last 10 years or so by carving out a nationwide footprint, recently foreign telecom majors have also set their sights on this market. This has led to stiff competition amongst telecom companies and evolution in service offerings. Service providers must be able to ensure that they stand out from the competition, not just on price, but on innovation in offerings and the speed by which they can deliver reliable new services. The quest to create meaningful customer experiences is driving the market, and OSS/BSS technology is at the heart of that initiative. Rapid introduction of new services
Indian carriers continue to invest in their networks to ensure that they can support the rapid growth in number of subscribers and high volumes in transactions. Efficiency of network utilisation is key and operations must be profitable for these carriers to remain price competitive. Service providers must be able to rapidly launch new services to market. According to a survey by Coleman Parkes Research, of the 100 wireline and wireless service providers around the world, the rapid introduction of new services is a key challenge to service providers now and will continue to be over the next two years. Despite the fact that most service providers ranked reducing time to market as a high priority, a mere 34 per cent of service providers can introduce new services in less than six months, with most new service introductions ranging from six to eighteen months.
Service providers are gravitating towards single vendor solutions or outsourced solutions in order to achieve rapid time to market, lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and to leverage best practices. Amdocs partners equipment providers such as Cisco and Alcatel Lucent, and is in a global partnership with IBM. VSNL has selected Cramer Amdocs OSS solutions for its Centralised Network Operations Centre (NOC) located in Mumbai to manage its broadband, wholesale voice, as well as enterprise and carrier data offerings. How big is the Operation Support Systems/Business Support Systems market? Industry analysts estimate that BSS and OSS external and IT spend is approximately $45 billion. The Indian OSS/BSS market is growing much faster and the growing subscriber base is slated to touch 500 million by 2010. Of late, there have been moves towards one player handling all all telecom infrastructure. Do you see this continuing? Amdocs’ strategy is to enable customers to achieve an “intentional customer experience.” We design our solutions to appeal to a variety of models, including one where we provide application management services. For example, we are working with AT&T to support AT&T’s legacy ordering and wholesale platforms. This includes software development, testing and production support. We also are part of models where we are within a larger deployment working alongside a number of system integrators or partners. The market has a wide range of players such as HP, IBM, and Indian vendors too. How do you distinguish yourself ? Backed by more than 1,000 successful projects worldwide for more than 20 years, we are the only vendor to offer an integrated OSS/BSS solution that spans from customer to network. Gartner has rated Amdocs Number 1 in OSS in its OSS Market Overview and Strategic Scorecard. Having worked with the industry’s largest providers, including AT&T, BT, Vodafone, and Telstra, we bring deep expertise and best practices. Unlike others vendors who also offer OSS/BSS support, it is the core business area for Amdocs. Additionally, we have a global partnership with IBM to enable service providers around the world to deploy next generation solutions. We also have a global partnership with Alcatel Lucent where we have a joint lab to develop triple play solutions. A customer who is benefiting from this is Telekom Austria. In India, Amdocs works with system integrators to deliver to Indian service providers a blend of global expertise and local knowledge.
More Stories on : Interview | Mergers & Acquisitions | Software
Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page
|
Stories in this Section |
|
The Hindu Group: Home | About Us | Copyright | Archives | Contacts | Subscription Group Sites: The Hindu | The Hindu ePaper | Business Line | Business Line ePaper | Sportstar | Frontline | The Hindu eBooks | The Hindu Images | Home |
Copyright © 2007, The
Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of
this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of
The Hindu Business Line
|