"Our Indian base will cater to the needs of neighbouring countries also" 
                                                       -AndrewMellorSouth East Asia Regional Manager, Cramer

Service providers already have their inventory management systems in place. Don't you think you are a late entrant in this market?
We had been contemplating to enter this market for a while and we had presence in India through our partners, but now we have decided to start our own operations. It's the right time for us to enter this market. Most of the service providers have shown interest in the solutions that we offer. We are the leaders in software license revenue for inventory solutions and has been ranked as the preferred inventory management provider by leading system integrators across the world. We sensed from a number of perspectives-that we are achieving a new level of critical mass in the marketplace. Cramer combines network inventory and service provisioning into a network resource management solution.

How will you differentiate your service offerings from competitors?
We have more coherent road map and articulately described strategy for supporting horizontal integration of inventory systems. Inventory management is the center of the OSS universe and that all OSS integration should start with inventory and that's where we have a role to play. The first thing telecom companies do when they regroup is to take inventory. With practically the entire communications industry in the process of regrouping, especially service providers, suppliers of inventory-based solutions have services to offer. Also since, all the service providers are in an expansion mode in India-replacing and installing new base stations is one of the prime agenda. We see lot of business coming from this segment. We are installing around 4,000 base stations for TTSL as part of our deal. Apart from this we would be installing complete radio access network and other core things critical to the network.

Does your solution allow documentation and management of purchases at the same time?
Yes, there are players in the inventory space that allows you to document what you purchase rather than manage what you sell. But inventory and documentation are not in their own right attributable to process automation. The market dynamics have changed, absolutely, so it is not a matter of whether money is being spent rather, it's who's spending it and what they are spending it on. The trend is in creating efficiencies around the inventory. 

What about the ERP players in this space? 
We are SAP partners across the globe and companies that are using ERP of other vendors would not have any problem in integration of our solution. Our inventory management solution is fully compatible with any ERP. 

What's your strategy going to be for the Indian telecom market? 
We have recently bagged two clients in India-TTSL and VSNL. Since we have NDAs signed with them, we won't be able to give exact valuation of the deal. We are in talks with several other service providers such as BSNL and Reliance. All of them are quite upbeat about the solution that we offer. We want to capitalize on the growth that Indian telecom market. We will have our India office in Mumbai and another sales office in Delhi. We do R&D work in Bangalore along with our partner Sonata. At present our strength is around 38 people and we are planning to scale it to 50 people by the year end. Our Indian base will cater to the needs of neighbouring countries also, prominent among  them are SAARC countries suchas Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Globally we serve around 80 telcos.

Rahul Gupta
rahulg@cybermedia.co.in                       

Kuldeep Goyal has been appointed as CGM of BSNL (Maharashtra). He will be responsible for the overall services in Maharashtra and Goa. Prior to this, he was the executive director, MTNL, Mumbai. Goyal is an engineering graduate from IIT Roorkee and belongs to Indian Telecommunication Service, 1971 batch. He has worked all over India, including: Gujarat, MP, Delhi, and Mumbai. He has also been on deputation to Yemen, for a project that was being implemented through Telecommunication Consultants India.

Vandrevala to Head Motorola's India Operations

Motorola has taken on Firdose A Vandrevala as a corporate vice president, and he will be head of the company's India operations. Vandrevala was earlier the chairman of Tata Teleservices and has spent 33 years with the Tata Group different capacities in the steel, power, and telecom sectors. Amit Sharma, who also served the India operations as vice president, regional management, South and Southest Asia, will move to Motorola's regional office. He will be responsible for corporate strategy for Asia. Vandrevala will be based Motorola's office in Mumbai.

MS Rana Appointed as Executive Director, MTNL, Mumbai
MS Rana has taken over as executive director, MTNL, Mumbai. Prior to this, he was chief general manager, landline services, MTNL, Mumbai. In his present assignment he will be responsible for the operations of MTNL for Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, and Thane and Mira-Bhayandar municipal areas. His priorities will be customer care and improvement in services and development. Rana graduated in electrical engineering from IIT Roorkee. He belongs to 1971 batch of Indian Telecommunication Service. In his 33 years career span in telecom industry, he has served in various positions and capacities at DoT, BSNL and MTNL.

TransWorks Takes Atul Kanwar as CEO

Atul Kanwar is the new CEO of TransWorks (an outsourcing company operating in the BPO/ CRM space). Kanwar has over 20 years of experience in IT and telecom industries. Prior to joining Transworks, Kanwar was the MD and senior vice president at e-Funds (a provider of technology and solutions in financial risk management and electronic payments space), where he was responsible for leading its outsourcing business.

Ramesh Anand to Head HeroITES' Sales in the US

HeroITES, has appointed Ramesh Anand as head of sales for the US. Anand will be responsible for identifying new business opportunities and also creating strategies to help HeroITES' US customers achieve and sustain optimal contact-center performance. Anand has more than 15 years of sales management and operational experience in leading internal and external customer care environment at several Fortune 500 companies. In his last assignment he was working as vice president-business development, North America, covering banking and financial services vertical for a leading BPO provider with delivery operations in India and the Philippines.

Fiserv Gets Maheshwari as President

Dr Arun Maheshwari has joined Fiserv Global Services Group as its president. Fiserv is an IT company for the financial industry. He was earlier the MD, president, and CEO of CSC India. In 1996, he set up the India subsidiary of policy management systems. In January 2001, following a merger with CSC, the company's name was changed to CSC India.

“We are actively talking to partners to develop this facility in India”
                                                                -JayHilbert, senior VP, global sales and marketing, Somera

Somera's tag line talks about 'equipping networks for life' but what is the focus of the company?
We have ten years of transactional history dealing with 1,100 different service providers and 350 different manufacturers. We have the history and data value of the equipment and share that information with our clients thereby helping them in purchase of equipment. We enter the carrier, discover its asset and its location, do valuation, purchase it, refurbish it, and then sell it to others. Our core areas of focus are equipment brokerage, recovery and repair of equipment.

Having set up India operations how do you plan to move?
For the initial 3-4 months we will focus on business development. In India the focus will be on four things-discovery, valuation, disposition, and acquisition. We will put people onsite in service provider space for discovering and tracking the capability. And then buy equipment from large players in India and supply it to service providers in Eastern Europe, Central America, Latin America.

What is Somera's revenue projections for the Asia Pacific region? When do you plan to sign the first carrier?
In 2006 we are planning to do revenue worth more than $10 mn and within 5 years we plan to grow it to a three digit figure. In Asia Pacific there is a lot of buying and it is a very important part of our business. Even brokerage in Asia Pacific is underdeveloped. So, we are optimistic about this market. We plan to sign the first carrier in 60-90 days time.

Somera is also planning to offer repair service in the country. How do you plan to offer this in India?
Another area is repair, where we plan to do circuit board repair of products. We are actively talking to partners to develop this facility in India. Initially, we will focus on non-core products and move to core products with time. We are presently evaluating partners and we plan to identify by the first quarter of 2006.

Are you also planning to focus on large enterprises or will you limit yourself to only service providers?
In Asia Pacific, we will initially target service providers and focus more on wireless space. We will not focus on wireline as it is owned by PTTs and it takes a longer cycle to operate. Our focus area will be GSM and CDMA equipment and includes equipment like base station switching, microwave equipment, power equipment, and others. In a year or two we will focus on data networking and target large enterprise users.

Where are you planning to set up your logistics warehouse?
Somera has invested a lot in logistics management in terms of IT inventory and logistics. We have our main warehouse in the US, where we have inventory in the range of $100 mn. We are planning the next warehouse in Kuala Lumpur, which will cater to the Asia Pacific region. We have a partnership with DHL where we can have a virtual warehouse capacity in a week's time.We will address logistics channel and match demand with our own supply.

Who are your competitors in this field?
In terms of equipment, we have CTDI; in terms of equipment repair, Telmar; in terms of equipment repair and broking, Sanmina; and Flextronics for repair equipment. 

Pravin Prashant
pravinp@cybermedia.co.in                        

“We will soon have bandwidth accelerators for mobile operators”
                                                    -JerryMKennelly president and CEO, Riverbed Technology

As networks come under increasing pressure to handle more data, latency is becoming a big issue. San Francisco-based Riverbed Technology promises to solve the problems of latency and bandwidth that plague a wide variety of applications over distributed networks. Ideal for a multi-location company, its products optimize WAN performance and reduce WAN traffic by up to 95% accelerating applications by up to 100 times. Jerry M Kennelly, president and CEO, Riverbed Technology sopke to VOICE&DATA about the India plans and what WAN acccelerator are all about. Exerpts:

How is your WAN accelerator different from products already available in the market?
Our product does not interfere with the bandwidth capacity rather it optimizes the traffic on the networks and reduces  the latency in delivering data. This in effect means the end user gets faster delivery or downloads where as more bandwidth capacity is freed for other things. It is not a cache and delivery technology, which is used in most of the bandwidth optimization solutions. We use cache, but in different manner. Our technology caches at the binary level not at the file or data level. Which means the number of trips for data transfer is reduced by almost 60-65%. File cache means they accelerate the files access; our product also reduces the number of servers. It is not an expensive technology and requires just two boxes on the access ends of the network. And, it is compatible with any switch or router available in the market today. It also works on the satellite networks where latency is a big issue. The RoI on this product is visible in less than six months.

What is the cost per unit? How many customers have installed Riverbed technology?
In the coming days there would be no network person dreaming to increase the performance without a WAN accelerator. Within a short span of 16 months we have installed 2,600 units and globally there is a potential for almost five million units. A WAN accelerator unit can cost anything between $15,000-20,000. Today most of the markets for this product can be called green flied because the network traffic is going up and congestion increases, need for these products would go up. For Riverbed there are over 325 revenue customers. In India we have eight multinational companies who are using our accelerators.

What about your India presence?
We have HP as our OEM distributors. We are also marketing and selling our products through EMC. Apart from these we have 90 resellers and 40 country distributors. These contribute to almost 85% of our revenue. In India we provide technical consultancy and support to network integrators such as Datacraft and Wipro Infotech. But the Indian market is calling us and we will increase our presence here.

What kinds of technical improvement are expected in future?
We will soon be coming out with a laptop and mobile version. This would increase the bandwidth being delivered through the Wi-Fi hotspots or the wireless medium to these devices. Similarly we are also working on bandwidth accelerators for the mobile operators, ISPs, and telecom service providers. With managed services being increasingly being offered by these service providers, our technology is ideally suited for such offerings where more network traffic speeds can be increased without adding more bandwidth. Currently, the awareness level for our product is not high. We are looking at educating the network integrators and end customers on this.

Anurag Prasad
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in     

3Com Extends Security and Convergence Support for Enterprises
3Com has introduced the a stackable LAN switch designed specifically to address small-to-medium enterprise customers' growing need for robust security and support of Voice over IP (VoIP) and other convergence applications. The new 3ComR Switch 4500 family combines standard-based security for user authentication; support for the new TippingPointT X505, an integrated security platform built upon intrusion prevention system (IPS) technology; and 'plug-and-play' support for multiple vendors' VoIP services. Designed using open industry standards, the 3Com Switch 4500 is available in 26-port and 50-port models. It includes layer-2 switching and layer-3 routing functionalities. There are also models with power over Ethernet. The switch also supports 802.1X authentication. The switch also supports device authentication through RADA (Radius authentication of device access) for authentication of devices that don't support 802.1X. The Switch 4500 26-port is priced at $1,095. The Switch 4500 50-port is priced at $1,995. The Switch 4500 PWR 26-port is priced at $2,295. The Switch 4500 PWR 50-port is priced at $4,295. 

Avaya's IP-Based Solution for SMEs

Called the IP Office, Avaya has launched it IP-based contact center solution for SMEs. It enables the organization with features such as conferencing, messaging, and contact center suite of solutions. Being an IP product, it can offers voice and data on the same network, centralized

messaging, up to 480 port system, 64-party conferencing. For the contact centers it also offers features such as reporting applications, conversion of text to speech, firewall, and built-in voicemail. Avaya aims for a 30% percent market share with its IP-based contact-center solution.

“Commercial and SMB market would grow two or three times faster”
                                             -MaciejKranz, senior marketing director, Desktop Switching Business Unit, Cisco

Cisco has been successful in maintaining its leadership position in the switching market. What steps are you taking to lead the market in providing new infrastructure technologies?
If you think, from the switching perspective, about designing the products, it's not about just the data in mind, but the entire blueprints and architecture of the system. Security is going to be the key for infrastructure. We enable security with infrastructure requirements and components of security in switching and then making them interactive to devices for managing network. So we provide end-to-end solution for the network. In the coming days, you can expect more wireless integration into the switching infrastructure. And that's where there's a shift of focus from enterprise to SOHO and SMB segment.

While the thrust of the company in India is research, is it also open to manufacturing some of its products here?
We're still investigating different strategies for the Indian market. And things that we are definitely considering are whether we should focus on products specifically for the Indian market or leveraging manufacturing infrastructure for other parts of the world. So, we're still in the process of evaluating these functions. But, as John Chambers said that India is something that we're looking at very seriously.

What applications and products are going to drive Cisco's future business in India?
We're taking a very comprehensive view of the market and a long-term investment view. When we are talking about enterprise, we have definitely had a long-standing and very good relationship with a lot of enterprises in India. And when we are talking about the just introduced products into this market and the space, the focus automatically goes on the SMB market. And then the third one is service provider, which is again growing very fast. Scalability is something they're turning to us for.

How has Linksys acquisition affected SOHO market strategy?
When we acquired Linksys, the focus was more on providing easy to home and home products but now we have been leveraging this pace as a starting point to use our home vision.

Why a sudden shift from enterpriseto SMB and SOHO segment?
Cisco has a big commitment to the SMB market. We introduced voice products into the SMB market at the same time as routing and security devices. And again, the key is not actually coming with the device but coming up with the integrated network. One example of it is really network management platform for SMB called Cisco Network, ware systems, and it has basically got full user integrated; you can use it to travel through the net, switching, routing, wireless and security devices as one entity. So we've done our homework We spend a lot of time before we engage with engineers and then see what other requirements are. In general, majority of our business comes from enterprises. John Chambers has been saying this that commercial SMB, plus the service provider market are basically the high growth segments of the market for Cisco. So I would expect that the commercial and SMB market would definitely grow two or three times faster than they tend to around the world.

Rahul Gupta
rahulg@cybermedia.co.in

When Disaster Strikes: Don't Dial, Just Text it
The mobile phone has become the device most people turn to in an emergency. Mobile networks experience huge increases in traffic immediately following a disaster and high-levels of demand continue for many days afterwards, according to data in a study published by the GSM ssociation (GSMA), the trade association representing mobile operators worldwide. 

The study by Enlightenment Economics shows how call volumes in Tamil Nadu (in southern India) for example, were up to 30% higher than normal levels for several weeks after the Tsunami last year struck that region. Similarly, voice usage soared 275% and text volumes by 350% in the areas most affected by the flooding in southern Germany in August 2005. Call volumes also rose dramatically following the bombings in Istanbul in November 2003. 
Importantly, while mobile phone operators experience similar surges on New Year's Eve or on the occasion of a big football match, in a disaster situation they usually have little time to prepare. If users send text messages in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, rather than make voice calls, they use less network capacity, making it more likely their message will get through.
“Anyone caught up in a natural disaster or other emergency is understandably desperate to reach their loved ones, call for help or pass on important information,” said Tom Phillips, chief regulatory and government affairs officer of the GSMA. “Mobile phones are the best way to do that, but people in a disaster zone should try to text, not talk.” 
Traffic data after disasters suggests that aid agencies and individuals caught up in the mayhem both rely heavily on mobile networks to find out information specific to their needs. The study, which examines communication patterns after the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Hurricane Katrina, the Bam Earthquake and several other catastrophes, found that mobile phones play a vital role in reconnecting dispersed people and efficiently matching aid to the particular needs of affected communities. 
After a natural disaster, the study found that mobile phone networks can often recover faster than fixed networks. Following Hurricane Katrina in the US, the use of portable base stations allowed operators to restore coverage relatively quickly. In cases of extreme congestion, operators sometimes reduce audio quality so that more calls get through.

Courtesy: GSM World