ITC has heavily invested in communications infrastructure to reach out to rural areas. VVR Babu, CIO, ITC talks about how the communications infrastructure is important in taking the business initiative further and the challenges he faced with the service providers. Excerpts:

How important is the communication/network infrastructure to your enterprise in its current and future business prospects?
Our communications infrastructure network comprising of VPN, VSAT, leased lines, etc., is the main backbone for the company to conduct business. This network is spread across the length and breadth of the country and presently integrates 380 plus operating locations of the company. It also connects us to our customers, suppliers, and other business partners. This network will continue to grow as IT penetrates to integrate all our business partners.

What are some of the key issues you witness in your communication and network infrastructure?
Non-availability of terrestrial links to a majority of our remote, rural locations still persists. Though most service providers claim a pan-India presence, most of the locations we want to include in our network lack the basic infrastructure.

Enforcement of service level agreements with service providers is still a challenge. You can be very articulate and very well define the SLA while signing the contract. But to implement it is an ordeal.

High uptime SLAs are still very expensive and this is one area that needs to be addressed. As the telecom industry in India is still evolving; the industry dynamics do not allow us to plan too far into the future. Especially with the current changing scenario in terms of technology and policies, it is very difficult to chalk out a roadmap way ahead in the future.

What are the problems you face as a CIO?
Customer-focused service delivery: though vendors paint a very rosy picture, the fact is that the customer focus is still amiss.

Lower MTTR (mean time to resolve): though the SLAs spell out stringent rules for uptime, the time spent on resolving the problems is still very high.

We cannot truly take the benefits to the end user due to constraints from the SPs. Consistently, there are higher expectations from the end-users with respect to uptime and speed, which can be delivered once the SPs deliver the speed and time.

How do you resolve these problems?
A single vendor currently services our VPN. We would like to move to a multi-vendor solution thereby derisking the dependency on one vendor. As there is only one person providing the services, there is no immediate fall back to continue the service offerings. There may be back-up plans in place but that still puts you in a situation where you are dependent on a single service provider. We hope that the multi-vendor strategy will also allow us wider pan-India coverage and provide redundancy in the network.

How do you see the current infrastructure setup-as an impediment or an impetus to the growth of business and organization?
The current infrastructure is definitely an impetus for growth of ITC's diverse business portfolio.

ITC's businesses have leveraged this infrastructure to create new business processes and models. E.g.,e-choupal for dis-intermediation and demand aggregation at the village cluster level; or the greetings cards business that used the Web for distribution of catalogs to distributors and collection of their orders from day one.

What are the key trends in enterprise communication? What top 5 technologies are going to make a mark in future?
Implement MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) technology, as it is the first complete and stable convergence protocol for data, voice, and video infrastructure. MPLS offers a number of advantages over traditional point-to-point technologies, including lower cost, greater scalability, and in many cases, improved reliability.

Minu Sirsalewale