Telicom : IT and the Telecom Revolution

The telecom sector has witnessed a fascinating growth in India over the past
several years. The sector comprises two classes of operatorsintegrated service
providers, who provide services to all screens (like Bharti Airtel) and pure
play mobile operators (like Vodafone). ITs significant role in both classes of
operators may be categorized as support IT and product IT.

Support IT is a combination of BSS (business support systems), OSS
(operations support systems), and ERP (enterprise resource planning)
capabilities required to run the business. BSS includes core capabilities such
as billing, customer care, interconnect, revenue assurance, fraud management,
call center, and business intelligence. OSS includes network-facing capabilities
around provisioning, network management, routing, auto discovery, and GIS and
inventory management. ERP includes HR, finance, intranet and supply chain
management capabilities.

One of the key challenges in support IT is the complexity in managing a
plethora of technology component providers that need to be stitched together in
an end-to-end architecture-based delivery model. This challenge was overcome
through a groundbreaking innovation of an S1 utility computing outsourcing
model. S1 stands for selective one player outsourcingan evolution from an SI
(systems integration) modelwherein one IT provider front-ends the entire
delivery chain. The S1 model is fiscally driven through a direct linkage to a
business outcome and is inclusive of IT delivery components.

Jai Menon, Group CIO, Bharti Enterprises and director, IT & Innovation, Bharti Airtel

The more interesting role of IT in telecom is when IT becomes the product
itselfProduct IT. This refers to a huge array of consumer and business
applications delivered through the telecom revolution. What has already begun as
an early set of VAS capabilities such as ring back tones, is now rapidly
progressing into mobile portal services, starting with WAP-based portals into
more compelling on-device portal-based experiences. Clearly, this experience is
linked across all three screensmobile, PC, and TV. Product IT is powered by IT
platforms such as the SDP (Service Delivery Platform), which includes
capabilities such as content management, digital rights, transcoding, and
personalization.

The infusion of Product IT into the telecom revolution puts us at the
threshold of transitioning from a dial tone ubiquity to providing information
tone to a billion people in India.

Support IT and Product IT are quite different from each other. Support IT is
largely a telco-hosted platform leveraging SOA principles of integration on
largely mature IT components. Product IT is newer with early stage technology
providers. It is a hybrid of telco-hosted and third party-hosted services that
are being linked through innovative business models and Web 2.0 style API sets.
The two, support IT and product IT, vendor ecosystems are being nurtured in
different manners, owing to the very nature of their maturity and have differing
implications for integrated versus pure play operators.

This brings us to the evolving role of telco CIOs who have to not only
recognize that they are dealing with two different types of IT clusters, but
also have to develop skill sets to build the appropriate techno-commercial
models to drive business innovation. The CIO 2.0 is an emerging trend across
industries, and we will see the telecom sector as a leading sector driving this
change wherein there would be a need to integrate multiple partners in to a
single Community of Practice (COP). The Bharti Airtel ITiCOP (IT and Innovation
COP), founded in 2002, is one such example of telecom IT that continues to
pioneer the 2.0 vision of IT-information tone for a billion people.