The Young Old

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With this issue of V&D 100 we start on our fifteenth year journey of celebrating the achievements of the telecom industry. VOICE&DATA has played the role of a telecom evangelist, chronicling the joys and sorrows of the industry.

V&D100, our annual survey of the performance of the Indian telecom industry, reminds me of many things. The most important is about vision and courage. We started this yearly activity almost thirteen years ago, when telecom was a small industry, not getting much media. At that time we knew that telecom, over the coming years, will be a very hot and closely-tracked industry. Further, even without active support from many major telecom operators and equipment vendors, we dared to calculate financial performance of companies and industry segments. And, fairly successfully.

Vision and courage is what it takes to make leaders. When CyberMedia, South Asia's biggest ICT publishing group, started 25 years ago, very few people had heard of computers, and only a few hundred in this country of 90 crore plus people had ever seen one. An entry level Intel 80286 based PC would cost almost Rs 1.5 lakh. Nobody had heard of a mobile phone, and the waiting time for a normal landline phone connection was 10 years in many places. It needed a person who could see beyond the present to envisage a magazine for IT and communications in 1982. When we launched Dataquest it covered everything about information technology and networking.

ibrahimahamad
ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in

The vision to project the future made us pioneers. And gave us the courage to start new projects. As the years went by readers wanted to know about business issues of the IT industry, and yet others wanted to read about implementation challenges in large organizations. That is when CyberMedia started launching new magazines-PCQuest for high-end technology readers, Voice&Data for the telecom industry, DQ Week for IT channel partners, DQChannels for IT solution providers. The idea was to start segmenting and serve the needs of each segment. What also happened in the process was that in many areas we were the only player. For instance, Voice&Data Connect, which we launched about 18 months back, is the only trade publication in the country for telecom channels.

In our journey we discovered that while the readers were thrilled, but like any other customer, they wanted more. Many said they wanted information not just through magazines, but also from conferences and seminars. CyberMedia once again adapted to market needs. Today we hold over 100 events with the objective of getting vendors and users on a common platform to share ideas and experiences. The Voice&Data CEO Conclave for instance, which is now held at the SAARC level, brings leading operators from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives, and Bhutan face to face with enterprise users and telecom policy makers.

Twenty five years, and still young and growing-I am sure all telecom industry stake holders would want to be young and growing in the years ahead. The mantra lies in futuristic vision to be able to identify new and potential areas, the courage to be the pioneer, and the capability to adapt to customer needs. This formula has proved successful for CyberMedia and Voice&Data. There is no reason it should not work wonders for all others too.