There are strong undercurrents of change in the T&M industry. Breaking away from its traditional image of a diagnostic tools industry, T&M is now emerging as a crucial differentiator in the service-delivery mechanism of operators. Vishnu Goel, CEO, Acterna, spoke to VOICE&DATA. Excerpts:

Which business areas you are focusing on?
As a T&M company we focus on five network areas—optical transport, cable, wireless, data IP, and access network. Our involvement with all these network technologies is of similar intensity. However, due to the emphasis on broadband, our involvement with optical, IP, and access is a lot more. On the wireless front, we are offering protocol testing related to transmission and signaling, and are involved in GSM, CDMA as well as switching.

The T&M industry is moving beyond just the diagnostic tools. What’s your take on this?
For the last one year, we have been trying to position T&M as ‘test and management’ instead of test and measurement. Traditionally, T&M boxes are seen as just afterthought expenditure, not as a proactive strategic investment to increase quality-of-service. We are trying to tell the market is that T&M vendors should be involved at every layer of the network. T&M should also be present in all phases of the network rollout as a strategic business investment.

Is T&M becoming a crucial part in the service-delivery mechanism of operators?
Absolutely. If you are a network operator who wants to decide what kind of QoS you are going to deliver and sign SLAs with customers, two aspects should be very sound. One is the network management system, and the other is CRM. While NMS ensures QoS, CRM will define how responsive you are to end customers. Acterna’s involvement is with the whole network management system and with providing linkages into CRM.

Traditionally, T&M industry is dependent on the tendering business...
On one hand, you have this tender-based business where you have to sell according to the L1 syndrome. On the other hand, you have to derive much-specialized instruments depending on which technology is being deployed on the network. It is a conflicting requirement. We are trying to move away from traditional pricing evaluation and thrust more on innovative services like synchronization, characterization, point on interface testing, and inter-connectivity evaluation. Our pitch is on QoS. We also want to provide all types of business consulting and design validation for the network.

What are the growth opportunities for the industry?
IP is what we are trying to drive very hard. PowerGrid’s Delhi-Mumbai link is based on DWDM and we are the only company in India, which has DWDM analyzers. Fiber characterization is another immediate opportunity. We have around 4-lakh km of fiber already laid down, and not even 1 km of this fiber has been characterized. This translates into Rs 40 crore of business for T&M companies. Validation testing is another entirely untapped market. Globally, 5–8 percent of the total network cost is spent on T&M. In India, this figure is abysmally low at 0.1 percent. My estimate is that this figure will reach 1 percent over the next two years when QoS becomes a crucial service differentiator.

MT Jeevan