Avhan Technologies, a CRM and call center software products and solutions provider, recently launched Avhan Call Flow Designer Ver 2.0—a toolkit for building telephony applications. Anand Awasthi, CEO, Avhan, talks about the market size and other related issues:

What are the issues before an enterprise with respect to technology?
The level of technology absorption among corporates is really very slow because of vendors' inability to understand their customers. Vendors are not guiding their customers. The real value comes when the vendor gets into customization. One should look at a platform that has a high degree of features, which can map the existing processes so that the features are available when the processes gets defined. Thus, one can have the desired technology in one go, because corporates cannot have the luxury of that much time. There exists a big gap between the technology developed outside India and its absorption in India and the cost pressures on corporates are very high.

How do you view the contact center solutions market in India?
Telecom services are a big market. E-governance is also a huge area that we are looking at, besides banking and finance.

What are the kind of solutions that are really picking up? Do you see any specific trend?
This includes prepackaged solutions, which need low time to integrate and deliver value. The market awareness is increasing but I don’t see things being driven from strategy. Rather, it’s driven by the reaction to the market and I think that’s the biggest failure of Indian corporates. A corporate needs to know his business, and understand the market well. It should also be able to strategize and then implement this technology to get what it wants.

When do you see the transition to server-based contact center?
The EPABX family in India is well entrenched and established. When you go to server-based platforms, many issues arising for a scale of more than 50 agents in terms of stability and scalability. This completely vitiates the logic of going for such platforms. Even though such issues can be resolved technically, the manpower in the market place, as of now, to manage and maintain the system, is not available. Absorbing the high technology for a fashion is of no use. The corporates are going through a learning phase. Technologies are being created very fast but for them to become part of business operations, a lot needs to be done. IP switching is nothing new, it has been implemented at the network level for 10 years now. I feel it will be in about 4–5 years before IP-based platforms become a reality.

Who are your technology partners?
Intel and Siemens are our global technology partners, while Zensar Technologies is the implementation partner.

Sudesh Prasad