IT Keeps On Ringing

Gartner
in its recently released global forecast for mobile phones predicted that mobile
phone sales will exceed 1 bn in 2009. Asia/Pacific accounts for most sales:
China and India alone will account for nearly 200 mn units in 2007, with the
Indian market surpassing China in 2009 to reach 139 mn units. The revenues of
the Indian cellular services market will reach $24 bn by year-end 2009,
recording a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.6%. Gartner also stated
that the Indian cellular services market had recorded the highest growth across
Asia Pacific and Japan in 2004 with a CAGR of 67%.

Best Practices for 2006

ITIL implementation and practices are being followed to manage the large infrastructure service delivery and service assurance Building logical infrastructure clusters that may be physically situated across various buildings or locations Managing the infrastructure which is spread across the country through centralized NOC Designing a well optimized WAN to cater to the spread and volume of transactions that need to be handled by a Telco Upgrade legacy applications to best of breed COTS applications for standardized operations throughout the country

With an
industry that has surpassed conventional growth expectations and is leaping in
time, the job of the IT heads of this industry is also changing dynamically. For
them, a positive concern is the progression itself. The growth at times is
beyond the projections and expectations and needs constant scaling of the
applications and infrastructure.

Apart
from the growth, handling of large amount of data generated from the
transactions is a daunting task. And to effectively handle the volume of
transactions they need to take automation to the field ie. data needs to be
captured at the point of customer interaction during the entire life cycle of
the customer from acquisition to retention.

To take
these issues head on, technology is being upgraded in the telecom space
constantly. New value-added services (VAS), IP based applications like VoIP,
broadband, Wimax that get introduced have an impact on new ways of billing,
customer care support applications etc. Go-to market speed is critical and hence
being ready with end-to-end automation for launching a new product is key to the
success.

The
trend is on data services-evaluating and offering various kinds of data
services that can be provided to the customers as plain vanilla voice is passé.
Ongoing increase in SMS, MMS, GPRS, office applications, enhanced e-mail
capability, is becoming more mainstream. Increased VAS services have resulted in
more innovation around content. VAS has moved to contributing over 25% in
revenue to the overall pie. VAS such as ring tones, call-back tones, games and
music downloads continue to play a significant role as a service differentiator
and as an important revenue stream.

A
significant trend has been to move the support focus from billing-which is
matured and streamlined-to business areas like CRM, BI and interconnect
operations.

The
CIOs of the telecom industry are spending big bucks on hardware and software
(very high end servers, TB/PB storage areas, high end SANs, best in class COTS
applications) and industry technical expertise costs.

According
to the senior IT executives, the cellular industry is a mass market phenomenon
that relies on economies of scale. Time to market advantage is critical and
favors those who follow aggressive network expansion. In the coming years, the
capability and capacity to further invest in penetrating semi-urban and rural
markets will be important determinants for increasing market share and creating
sustainable businesses.

CIOs
will continue to struggle to strike a balance between yield
(income/earnings/margin) and growth.

Minu Sirsalewala 

minuvs@cybermedia.co.in