India initiative on Global ICT segment – A step towards Innovation

India is considered to be home of brilliant brains on the analytical side. Post liberalization in 90’s, global organization flooded into India to tap Indian consumer. It also generated millions of Jobs in India. The liberalization enabled Indian Organization such as TCS, Wipro, Infosys and many more in their respective domain. The electrifying growth in IT helped India to be hub of IT super power mind and helped most of the Global 500 companies in enhancing or streamlining their IT infrastructure. The Telecom sector growth in from 2001 to 2010 also attracted Technology companies from around the world to be part of the growth. It is evident that India was part and parcel of many innovative products launched by Global firm but it is also clear that being an outsourcing organization, India lost out on the patent part. US, Japan and Europe became the hub of innovations and leaders in defining the standardization processes whereas China took opposite direction to redefine their own standardization processes. China got successful negated the criticisms by clearly defining the government policies and opening up most of the potential sectors. The short approval processes and incentives helped china in attracting huge FDI in manufacturing sector and in turn influenced the standardization processes in positive way. Even though India defined the processes clearly but delay in approval of processes worked as show stopper for innovative organization to be in India and tap into skilled resources. The focus on outsourcing and revenue forced organizations to offer Job specific training to professional to enable them fulfill customer requirement. In last few years post bubble burst in BPO sector, government and industry veterans stressed that India should be focussing on contributing standardization processes in ICT domain. The vision was to help local and global organization to be on the same platform in defining and refining their product line based on the agreed standardization process to reduce Interoperability, portability as well as increase security across converged network. The Global ICT standardization for India www.gisfi.org came into existence supported by multiple ministries of India, standardization bodies and leading research organization www.ctif.aau.dk . CTIF is research arm of Danmark based Aalborg University www.aau.dk . The  GISFI, vision is to bring India Innovation and contribution towards the ICT domain to the world forum and in turn help growing Organization to get more visibilities in the Technological area. The larger vision of the forum was to give exposure to Indian Universities as well as Students to interact with leading global Universities in the field and Innovations, Standardizations and Patents. Post three years of forum inception leading technological and service providers community are contributing on multiple technology domain. The initiative attracted flurry of collaboration with global universities, research labs and standardization bodies. The forum focuses on security, IoT, cloud, applications and next generation telecom networks (5G) helped Indian and Global organization to share knowledge and potential on the same. Being a part of one of the working group as a contributing member, I believe that the major beneficiary apart from processes and organization; Indian Students and Universities are getting direct exposure of domain veterans. University collaboration with CTIF enabled students to pursue their masters in leading International Universities in the technological specialized area whereas 100’s of Indian P.hD students are enrolled with multiple CTIF affiliated universities across global geographies. The new initiative should be populated across the professional group so that more and more organizations and professional can reap the benefits out of it.

Cloud based Enterprise mobility may be a game changer for innovative companies

In recent years, the talks of all technology forums revolve around Application, Cloud and Enterprise mobility. The growing adoption of smartphone and better data connectivity is fuelling data traffic. Based on the reports major chunk of generated data traffic originates from social networking and messaging site. The higher adoption of Androids, iOS, BBY and Window operating system based smartphone brings in the level of uniformity which might help in higher adoption of Enterprise centric horizontal and vertical application to populate and retrieve information from backend server side. According to Zinnov Management Consultancy, Indian Enterprise mobility market reached close to $250 Million and expected to reach $1 Bn by 2015. The projection seems too steep to achieve that even in very optimistic economic environment whereas India is struggling to achieve even 5% GDP growth. The Enterprise mobility market is also very small compared to US which crossed $22 Bn (Researchandmarket).The biggest challenge faced by Indian Enterprise is more towards the interoperability, porting, security etc. The tough economic situation also offer and integrated benefit to think out of box to enhance productivity and reduce the cost to reach out to potential customer base. The BFSI, Transportation, Manufacturing and partly healthcare sectors are deploying Enterprise mobility basic features to sharpen their effective and efficient mechanism to approach any opportunities or concerns aggressively. Enterprise mobility adoption in India by in-large limited to Corporations with PAN India as well as International presence. The cost of Enterprise mobility per user runs high due to the complete system acquisition. It is one of the decisive factors by SMB and SME to park Enterprise mobility adoption. Given the potential of new business opportunity around SMB and SME segment, the solution provider may reap earlier mover benefit by offer server level features with dynamic service and business logic processes. It would enable potential clients to only pay for the process needed as per their business requirement. The lower cost of smartphone should be exploited by solution provider through their platform integrated MDM, BPM, RMS etc. The SMB and SME in the proposed scenario would need to redirect their connectivity traffic to get connected with solution provider cloud hosted middleware. The solution provider platform should also support drag-drop-develop applications interoperable on all leading mobile operating system. The solution providers are offered huge business opportunity in India by unleashing their state of art platform. In my point of view, the combination Cloud PaaS and AaaS designed for broader Enterprise mobility would bring in new business revenue coming out of shell of instead of limited HRM,CRM, ERP and Email.

Is Indian PSU’s are helping in maintaining India Telecom Story

Indian Telecom sector started witnessing turbulent time post 2G scam. The entry of additional service provider added fuel in fire by escalating tariff war. It resulted in deep recession in Telecom sector. The incumbent private service provider lost major ground to regional and challengers in all circles. It prompted Incumbent to introspect their service offering and area of concern which resulted in fall of revenue attributed by multiple factor. The MNP regulation was used by low earning subscribers as a tool to get the freebies from competitors and get the communication service literally free of cost. The tariff war and easy way to get the connection offered subscribers a way to acquire multiple connections to avail lower tariff from multiple service providers. It also helped them to bypass roaming charges while being on other service geographies of service provider. The revenue sucking environment prevailed for more than year till 2G scam surfaced. The speedy trial and greater scrutiny of subscriber address forced many subscribers to stop using multiple connections. The sudden changes in regulatory environment dramatically increased non active subscriber base. In FY11-12, the VLR active subscriber base stood at 30-32% of total subscriber base. Post license cancellation by Supreme Court, the incumbent got an opportunity to realign their strategies to get back their lost subscriber base through multiple point of action. The decision initiated major write off of non VLR active subscriber and subsequently total subscriber base started going down steeply in first half and early second half of FY12-13. Bharti Airtel, Reliance communication, Vodafone, Tata and Idea shed out around 50 Million non-active subscriber base whereas Aircel, Uninor, Videocon and other lost millions of subscriber due to the license cancellation. The unexpected move by Incumbents took everyone by surprise and all analysts scrambled to re-access the growth potentials in Indian Telecom sector. The government also struggled to project their India Telecom growth story afloat. During all these period, I failed to see any write down by government PSU telecom players. The TRAI Feb 2013 subscriber data clearly indicates the same. In Feb 2013, Indian wireless sector again started showing net positive subscriber addition which also includes positive net addition by major PSU Telecom Company. On detailed analysis of VLR active subscriber base, it is evident that PSU company VLR active subscriber % is only 54.17 of their 100.6 Mn subscriber. The incumbents VLR active % are running at higher than 93 % and current VLR active subscriber base is 712 million out of total subscriber base of 862 million. It translates to a conclusion that PSU contribution in non-active subscriber base is currently running at 30.5%. Based on the TRAI directives and release of number, incumbent were directed to indicate non VLR subscriber data as well as to initiate the clean-up process. The non-initiation of process by PSU might be a reason to keep the Indian wireless sector growth story intact. I believe that proactive approach by PSU to clean up the non-active subscriber base would bring down Indian wireless sector subscriber base by another 7-8% to 820 – 840 Mn range by the end of FY13-14

OTT sector may experience tough road ahead post raised concern by Telco’s

The dynamic shift of telecom services model in recent years showed many interesting delivery mechanism. The OnNet product hosting got the back seat and OffNet based product got an inroad through the higher adoption of applications. The agnostic application hubs played a crucial role in enhancing subscriber options as per the geographies. The adoption of high speed data network and subsequent device revolution led innovative organization to offer OTT services to subscriber. The device OEM openly supported OTT players by integrating their widget to be differentiator in the market place. The leading service provider across geographies raised their concern regarding loss of revenue due to OTT players and also started raising their expectation on different forums. The service providers are raising concern that OTT players service such as messaging are consuming huge bandwidth for little revenue. It is also impacting their messaging service revenue. Their argument lies on the investment part. Without investing on infrastructure, OTT players are only paying for the bandwidth usages and hurting the ecosystem players of service providers. The common concern raised by world leading service providers is going to force regulatory to look at it. The innovative OTT messaging services attracted millions user as it is without charge. Billions of revenue generating messages for service providers is lost to OTT players. In fact, the volume of messages and video traffic from OTT to service providers are increasing on daily basis. Telecom service providers assumed that any form of messaging and any other service traffic which is landing on their registered subscriber devices and travels through their network must carry price point in case information origination is from OffNet service providers. The service providers must get the revenue for the delivered message instead of getting revenue from network bandwidth utilization. In my point of view, In India, the OTT based messaging the data centric service using service provider bandwidth should be brought into regulators body attention. The loss of revenue is not only for service provider but also for the government exchequers as government gets around 35% of the total generated revenue in the form of revenue sharing and taxation. The recent rise in wireless security threat with the higher adoption of data centric device also raises concern of accountability. The service provider’s networks are used for transit and is forcing service provider to install additional infrastructure and resource to make sure of traffic free from any vulnerability. I strongly support service provider concern and believe that sooner than later action from regulatory body is warranted to set the accountability as well as responsibility factor and also safeguard revenue leakage for both service provider and government.

Slow Cloud Computing Adoption by SMB & SME in India

With the Technological landscape shift post Internet bubble, major technology company started trying to figure out the innovative approach to reduce the IT TCA & TCO for their client. By 2004 the adoption trend started showing shift and increase business for data centre hosted managed service product portfolio. The virtualization technology brought dynamic shift in network design and deployment which in turned impacted the adoption positively. The growth propelled the datacenter competitor to think out of box to come out with even more exciting proposition. The downturn in 2007-2008 pushed many data centres into a state of closure as the clients reduced their capex and opex model to survive the worst financial crisis. The Private hosting or ownership model got changed into resource utilization based on computing power to remove the ownership cost and increase the return on investment. The concept of cloud computing quickly gained traction across sector and geographies. Many technology service providers started converting their product line to be compatible for cloud computing environment. US and W-Europe again led adoption cycle. The BaaS, IaaS, PaaS, AaaS, SaaS; the form of cloud services got many takers and changed the fortune of many technology companies. The proprietary dominated product line based companies such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle also approached cloud in big way and remodelled their product offerings accordingly to make it more affordable for broader client base. India also observed shift towards cloud services but with very lower pace. Many companies such as Tatacommunications, Tulip, Sify, Reliance globalcom, Bharti, and many more collaborated with Technology big-wigs to tap the huge revenue opportunity. A country with home of more than 8 Mn SMB & SME approached the concept cautiously as compared to peers in western world. It raises queries regarding the slow adoption. I read many article and most of them raised data protection, security as their top concern. In India, the SMB and SME define; refine their IT roadmap and stresses on localized development to keep the cost under check. Any updates and patches are done based on the organization service area and IT capex/opex allocation. Interestingly, the Indian PSU’s are still struggling to convert their paper based information into digitized form and in turn adopt innovative cloud service offer. In my point of view, the stumbling point in decision making process is the concern regarding data portability. In the absence of proper data portability, SMB & SME won’t be able to reap the benefits of cloud. The second major concern is the accessibility. Major chunk of SMB and SME are located in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and connectivity issues as well as cost are the concern for them. India is still witnessing heavy investment to enhance the communication connectivity segment. The data protection, data hosting, data transition route, security, interoperability, SLA and regulatory are some of the major decision making tags due to the recent government. According to NASSCOM report, the total market size of cloud computing in India is $400 Mn and their projection is to reach 16 Bn by 2020. The slow adoption of Cloud in India may impact Indian organization competitiveness in long run and productivity. Technology companies and communication service providers are forging collaboration to push cloud with little success.

Enterprise mobility may act as saviour to regain growth story in telecom sector

Enterprise mobility is making news for the last half decade. Most of the Telco and Technology companies developed their strategy to define, develop, deploy as per their requirements to reap the benefits of the same. The Technology companies such as Sybase, Kony, Antenna, Microsoft, IBM, HP, NEC and many more came out very strongly with standardized specification to tap the untapped market place. They got successful in developed geographies such as US, West Europe, Japan whereas still struggling to be successful in mass market such as India, China, Brazil and many more. Many analysts concluded that the applications, data protection, security and low end device are the core reasons of slow adoption. The slowdown in Telecom Industry and its cascading impact acted as contributing factor of India on-going recession. An unpredictable slow adoption of 3G, few launches on BWA domain and heavy investment around the same raised the economics around the investment. With growing concern of communication service providers regarding regulatory compliance impact on their mobile value added services, low voice & data ARPU brought them to a stage of financial bleeding. I believe that, even now its not late that CSP refocus on Enterprise mobility potential portfolio. Even the basic Enterprise mobility product or service or attached application would bring much needed revenue $ without or with little research $. As per the published report, India is home of more than 450 Mn self and salaried professional and they can be the target customer. The Enterprise mobility would increase the D-ARPU and additional recurring revenue from application level license fee. I strongly believe that during the most probable worst phase of telecom industry, Enterprise mobility may act as revenue saviour.

MNP in India is facilitating Incumbent to recapture their lost ground

The intention of regulators is to offer level playing field in telecom segment and also to enhance the service offering QoS indirectly. At the onset of MNP launch, the challenger and regional player clutched the opportunity to grab new subscribers by offering lucrative voice and text plan. It also triggered tariff war escalation which impacted industry dearly. The addition of new subscriber also encouraged challenger and regional player to go in big way in introducing new but not successful product with lower price points. By early 2012, it was the talk of street that incumbent players are going to suffer more subscriber loss due to aggressive price point coupled with free minutes by the competitors. The revenue growth of the regional and challengers started falling at higher speed than incumbent which led to subscriber dissatisfaction. For the last few months the average per month request crossed 2.5Mn. On detailed analysis, it is quite clear that once the dominant subscriber acquisition strategy of challengers and regional players did not work and they lost revenue generating subscribers to incumbents. At the same time, the Supreme Court ruling on challengers and regional player service continuation in cancelled service area led subscriber in no man’s land. The subscribers used MNP as a tool to keep their communication system running and not losing the contact with their dear ones. The regulatory directive which was once used by the regional and challengers the most to hurt Incumbent in turned impacted them the most. It is believed that the regional and challengers brand image got the major beating and it would take additional advertisement in dollars and years to recover the same level of trust from subscriber end. Idea Cellular result validated the same.

Is India Broadband story losing steam?

In my earlier blog “Unrealistic National Telecom Policy vision to achieve 70% Teledensity by 2017 & 100% by 2020“; I categorically highlighted the optimistic forward looking projection regarding the potential subscriber base in next 5 to 7 years. Based on TRAI Feb 2013 monthly subscriber data, it is evident that even with 160 license holder and 116 service providers; the YoY growth of 10.76% in subscriber addition is too week. The projections made in NTP-12 require India to grow by triple digit to achieve target by 2017. On the contrary, the released report shows decrease in total subscriber from 15.01 to 15 Mn. In a country, where price point instead of performance play a central role in consumer decision making process, I believe the current broadband price points are still high to attract higher adoption. As I highlighted earlier in my other blog posts that Indian government imposes high double digit taxation on telecom service also contributes in higher price point of current broadband services from service providers. For the benefit of ecosystem player including the inclusive growth of country, government should offer tax breaks or other incentives on infrastructure deployment in low adoption cities to propel higher subscriber base. It would not only have positive impact on the consumer social awareness, potential and will inflict positive business opportunities for ecosystem player. At the end of the game, higher volume and higher business for ecosystem would contribute in government coffers through lower tax. In the above scenario, it would be win-win for all.