The telecom industry in India has undergone tremendous deregulation, to promote competition. As a result, there has been a marked improvement in quality of services. But the improvement in infrastructure has a long way to go to support the diverse and complex needs of the corporate customer. In a world where technology is morphing rapidly, what are these needs? And are they being met? To discuss this, VOICE&DATA invited SR Balasubramaniam, V-P (IT), HDFC Bank, and Girish Deshmukh, manager (GSD transports), Jet Airways, to voice the corporate view. From the delivery side, IC Srivastava, executive director, MTNL Mumbai; Sudipta Sen, MD, Comsat Max; Rahul Chaudhry, CEO, Tata Power Broadband; and Birju Mehta, assistant V-P, Hughes Tele.com were present. Amit Chatterjee, country sales manager, HP Software Business presented the vendor angle while Ibrahim Ahmad, executive editor, VOICE&DATA, moderated the discussion.

Network Availability
SR Balasubramaniam, HDFC Bank: Availability is not the availability between my office and the nearest office. There are people in Bharuch or Surat also. When that person goes to his PC or terminal and he wants to do a transaction to service our customers across the counter, the network should work. When a customer wants to go and collect money from the ATM, the ATM should also be working. Virtually, we are talking about 24 hours of availability.

Girish Deshmukh, Jet Airways: I am talking from an airline’s point of view. For me, everything has to work 24 hours a day. If you are member of Jet privilege, and if you call and something goes wrong, you will say what kind of airline is this. What is the use of this frequent flyer card that I have. So, the mechanism that is there to support the system should work all the time. I would like to see how this can be related with the commercial type of agreements that I have with various service providers or device providers.

"Services should definitely be available twenty-four hours a day."

IC Srivastava, MTNL

Sudipta Sen, Comsat Max: We have gone to the extent of creating the escalation process which is not reactive but proactive. Down the line it is not an issue of abdication but an issue of true delegation, whereby guys know that if it has got escalated right up to MD, he can get a call any moment. It takes care of ensuring that we know where the problem is.

IC Srivastava, MTNL Mumbai: There is no denying the fact that services should be available twenty-four hours a day, and in case of a problem the reaction time should be very fast. Or some standby arrangement should be there.

Rahul Chaudhry, Tata Power Broadband: We need to understand the criticality of the customer’s business. The kind of network we run supports a lot of call centers. We also run a network that supports a lot of ISPs and operators who provide VPN. Now for them, midnight can be downtime but for the call center, it would be a critical point.

Service Level Agreements
Sudipta Sen: People are insisting on SLAs—something that was not there earlier. It is an issue of competition and therefore a requirement today.

IC Srivastava: There is a proposal from TRAI that SLA should be there. But if there is a downtime then what penalty should be imposed? The customer is not interested in getting money in lieu of service being down. Monetary compensation cannot compensate for the image loss that he has undergone.

“SLAs need to be drafted from Indian perspective.”

Girish Deshmukh  Jet Airways

What we should not forget is that we are working in a scenario, where we are providing services over a mixed network. India should not be compared with the advanced countries. In Japan, the underground cable was laid in a tunnel. One can walk through the lighted tunnel even at night, such is the level of cleanliness. Now, even if that cable wants to go faulty it cannot. Nobody can damage that cable. In India, we can try our best, and must do that. There is no point in giving 99.9 when I am at 80. Let me come to 90, then 99 and then 100.

Birju Mehta, Hughes Tele.com: Availability is one aspect of SLA. The second point is how much time it takes to get your circuit up. Everybody wants to get his project up and running in time. The third aspect of SLA is that every system needs to be maintained, which is known as maintenance downtime, which is required for either preventive or corrective maintenance.

Rahul Chaudhry: For taking SLA from 95 to 99 percent there is a cost. But if I have to give guarantee and SLA of 99.5 percent, it doubles. If I had to guarantee, something like 100 percent, theoretically it would be infinite. We are not talking about theory, we are talking about practicality of things.

What I have seen in many sales situations is that some of our competitors just come in and put a number. You have to go back and analyze and that is where the users are getting educated. So it is a process that is moving forward. SLA may not be a TRAI requirement, but it is a reality in our business.

“An SLA can be broken up into multiple SLOs— service level objectives.”

Amit Chatterjee,  HP Software

Amit Chatterjee, HP Software Business: You need to document what you mean by service and that document is what you call the SLA document. The SLA document is a large document. The examples we have talked about 99, 99.5 uptimes are what we define as SLOs—service level objectives. You can sit with the vendor and break up the SLA into multiple SLOs, so that each of those matrices is defined.

How does the operator go about ensuring that he can adhere to that SLA or each of those SLO matrices? There has to be an integrated management study because service delivery is not about the service being provisioned and then tracking the service like bandwidth being provisioned and tracking the availability of that bandwidth. No, when we talk of SLA we are talking right from the point of service delivery.

You reach out to your operator and contract for the service, and the operator comes and delivers the service to you. That is what we call as service provisioning. You start to deliver your service from the service provisioning stage. Once your service is provisioned, there is an aspect of assuring the service based on the SLA that you have defined. That is what we call as the service assurance phase. And once you are managing the service within the service management levels, there is the aspect of measuring the service usage.

When the customer has come and he is accessing multiple services over your network, which of those services are most important for your customers? Which is the set of services which gives you maximum revenues? There is a need to have an integrated service management strategy.

“There is more to SLA than just the availability.”

Birju Mehta,  Hughes Tele.com

Girish Deshmukh: Most of the companies, be it service providers or equipment vendors, look at the Western model of SLAs. Why are these SLAs drafted for the US situation? If you go through the clauses, none of the causes are tailored even today by big corporates to suit the Indian situation. Can’t we change these agreements and draft them to suit the Indian environment?

Pricing
SR Balasubramaniam: Service providers, on their own, are not passing on the benefits, though we find out that the cost of these things have gone down drastically. Sometimes, when the competitors approach us, we come to know that what we are buying at Rs 100 is available for Rs 45. Then we start reworking on that, go for an alternative or confront the existing service providers.

Yes, as a corporate it is much better to deal with service providers or a vendor for that matter. It’s a definite advantage because given the volume of the business they do with you, they cannot simply ignore your needs.

Sudipta Sen: No doubt, there was a significant drop in the pricing. But a lot of users are saying that the reductions have not been passed on to them. They have surely been passed on to the users. I would love to have those clients paying me bandwidth at the rate of 1 lakh per kbps, which was the case when we started off six to seven years ago. Today, you look at the cost that people are paying—significantly lower. Similarly, look at the price of a VSAT. The TDMA type of VSAT, which used to be around Rs 7–8 lakh is now priced at around Rs 1 lakh.

“Costs have come down for the customers too. ”

Sudipta Sen,  Comsat Max Tele.com

Another issue is that at times our business is highly competitive. Among our friendly competitors, I have seen people giving such wonderful deals that are difficult to resist. When it comes to customer acquisition, somebody can pay X amount today and think that in next five years he would earn Y amount of money out of that. But the bigger issue is of being able to sustain that cost over a period of time. Can someone keep on acquiring someone else’s client paying that kind of money and still be in business? It is debatable. But in such a situation, at times the existing client feels that the service provider was fleecing him. My answer to that is if because of competitive pressure, somebody comes and gives sweet deals, that does not mean that the client was being fleeced.

Birju Mehta: I would say one thing. Basically, if the operators are making lot of money and the benefits are not being passed on to consumers, then you should find all service providers having a very healthy balance sheet, which except in the case of incumbents, is not good.

Girish Deshmukh: Most of the time, yes we are getting the money’s worth. How do we ensure that partly we are also following the same strategy. We have alternatives and that is why we don’t put all our eggs in one basket. We are getting money’s worth from service providers, but I can’t say the same for equipment vendors and manufactures of equipment. I don’t think it is as good as it is from service providers.

“The problem is not always due to the connectivity.”

Rahul Chaudhry,  Tata Power Broadband

Maintenance and Support
Amit Chatterjee: Whenever an enterprise customer outsources anything, be it is infrastructure or application, there is a huge concern about what the service providers are doing in delivering QoS. And there are two concerns. Whenever there is an outage, you want to know about it instantaneously, particularly if the outage is critical. Then you want to know what has gone wrong. But often the operator may or may not be reachable. So if the service provider is proactive and transparent, he can gain the confidence of his customers and that addresses one of the challenges that service providers face of retaining the customers.

Rahul Chaudhry: Very often, I’ve seen that the problem is not necessarily because of connectivity, but the guy who is providing the connectivity is the first at the receiving end. If I were to take a stand that it is not my problem, what would the customer do because there is no agency taking complete responsibility of the full chain? I think that’s an interesting challenge and may be one can throw some light on how to manage that.

SR Balasubramaniam: AMC is another subject that needs to be addressed. I find that AMC costs are billed as percentage of total equipment purchased. But then even if it is 7 or 8 percent, it is huge. And that’s an annual amount. If you clock the number of visits, the number of breakdowns, and the cost of the engineers, that does not come to even a fraction of what is paid for. This is an important issue. The service providers or the vendors need to look at it from a realistic point of view.

“SPs are not passing on the benefits to customers.”

SR Bala subramanian,  HDFC Bank Broadband

Rahul Chaudhry: Let me tell you that regarding the AMC issue, even as service providers, we do not take anything less than 4 percent from our vendors and that too because we are a very large user. In most of the cases, we end up paying 6.5 or 7 percent. For our own AMCs, as we are not as big as, say, MTNL, we cannot have hundreds of engineers trained. It becomes a part of outsourcing to us also in our business. There is also an element of AMC being viewed as ongoing revenues.

This brings up issues like the cost of acquisition and the benefits that can be accrued.

An ideal situation would be an ASP model where the applications can be outsourced to somebody, and he provides the bandwidth and the SLAs are all integrated at the backend. There have been cases where ASPs in the West have tried to bundle it with bandwidth.

Nareshchandra Laishram