A the competition increases from countries such as Ireland, Russia, and China, it is very essential that the major software houses in India have high-quality telecom infrastructure.

Are the current infrastructure facilities good enough? What are the distinct telecommunication needs of the software exporters? Which are the areas of services where telecom service providers must improve to enable their customers in the software/technology sector take on their global competitors?

To find out the answers to these, VOICE&DATA conducted its Top View discussion on the subject—Networking India’s Software Powerhouses. The discussion he ld in Bangalore had on its panel, KS Srinivasan, GM, Central Bangalore Telecom District, BSNL; S Srinivas, head (networks), Tata Teleservices; Vasappa Mahesh, joint director, STPI; Dr Utpal Chattopadhyay, GM (software operations), Motorola India; Rajgopal Nayar, GM, (technical network services), IBM Global; G Dhananjayan, (chief of sales and marketing), Bharti Telenet; Ramannkutty Nair, V-P and chief of business (Karnataka), Reliance Infocomm; AN Rao, CIO, Digital Global Soft, Ibrahim Ahmad, executive editor, VOICE&DATA, and Sean Dexter, CEO, Spice Telecom. Excerpts:

Ibrahim Ahmad, moderator: One is looking at India being able to do software business worth 50 billion dollars in the next 5 to 7 years. That is the big target and obviously the quality of communication infrastructure and the quality of services that are offered is going to play a very big role in this entire plan that we have.

Rajgopal Nayar, IBM: I would say the first concern normally which people have when they try to contract project out here is: Is the infrastructure good enough? Do you have very resilient infrastructure, do you have back-to-back SLAs with the infrastructure providers so that we are comfortable with giving this task to you?

Dr Utpal Chattopadhyay, Motorola: Naturally, over the last 10 years the telecom infrastructure in the country, the services being offered have gone up several notches but the fact is the demand of the world keeps increasing also. It is only about 2-3 years now that we are actually developing major piece of handset software in India here in Bangalore. Even a network jitter that lasts several minutes will destroy the entire synergy that is being done across the world and will push back our delivery by several days. No corporation can tolerate having the product delivery dates being shifted by 2-3 weeks.

AN Rao, Digital Global Soft: Of the six out of nine situations that we are talking about, I don’t think there are issues on connectivity. Connectivity is not one of the top three parameters, but the remaining areas continue to be big parameters.

Vasappa Mahesh, STPI: When we see that industry meets the target of $50 billion or 80 billion that we talk about by 2008. When we compete with other countries like China or Indonesia, Malaysia. They don’t talk anything about downtime and all those things. That is where we need to pay attention to and see that we meet the expectation of the customers who is sitting on the other side which will help Indian industry to meet the requirements of their customers.

KS Srinivasan, BSNL: The availability, the provisioning of network is also one of the issues. As a service provider from the BSNL, it has been our experience that the last mile has been the most problematic. As far as the transmission links are concerned, we may be able to provide a high degree of stability by bringing in SDH rings within the city, within the state and between the different states.

G Dhananjayan, Bharti Touchtel: I would say that everyone is going through the learning curve. You start with a set of learning curve; you grow up in learning the service. Today when we go and talk to corporate accounts the discussion is not less than 99.999. So the expectations have gone up because internationally the demands are like this. I am sure once the learning curve improves among all companies we will able to give much better service to the corporate.

S Srinivas, Tata Teleservices: The only activity which needs to be looked is the coordination amongst our own service providers to ensure that we do not damage each others’ assets. Once that is achieved the last mile problem will be totally solved. It will be possible to provide the kind of services which are available in other developed countries. Other than that, technologically, product-wise, equipment-wise we are providing the same kind of services which are available everywhere else. So it is only little bit of coordination and living with each other which are required to ensure that the customers are kept happy.

Sean Dexter, Spice Telecom: As a user of bandwidth, it is extremely important that pricing does come down. The software houses have talked about international business and yet really as I see it within India there is huge potential for national business and one of the reason why that national business is not there today is because of pricing, availability, and unwillingness of corporates to invest.

Ibrahim Ahmad: IT-enabled services, for example, is seen as a big growth area, and the key issue here more than any other sector will be quality of telecom infrastructure. If that gap is not filled up very fast then there is always the chance that we may lose out. Especially when the competition is coming up from other countries.

Rajankutty Nair, Reliance Infocomm: India has got 2,000 Mbps of international bandwidth while China has 500,000. So there is a big gap. I am talking about past six months’ figure. China’s figure would have gone far ahead of that. China is slowly becoming a competitor of India in terms of software. So it is very important that we should cover this issue.

Whether the services will be available on demand. Whether it is 99.99 percent reliable. Unless the infrastructure is properly placed it would not be possible to achieve this. I think all these concerns are being addressed. Within a few months, you will see a sea change in telecom scenario.

AN Rao: Please try and understand our business needs per se. I have been saying this to systems provider as well as service providers. Don’t come to tell what you have, ask us what we need. Come to me with solutions. That is the expectation I have. Mere infrastructure does not resolve my problems. Fiber is not connectivity. That is not what we are talking about. We are looking at setting up a customized umbilical between us and customers oversee to deliver.

Dr Utpal Chattopadhyay: If you talk about software industry going to be $50 billion, it is no longer an issue of availability of pipes or cutting down prices. Cutting down prices does not help us at all. I would request service providers to benchmark against our competitors. We are losing business; we are going to lose business to Russia soon. What kind of infrastructure they have, what are their jitter characteristics. So rather than saying that we are working on it we need to understand what is the gap. In an international setting what is the gap between us and China, and our nearest competitors and how can we make sure that we reduce the gap rather than having a vague sense that we are doing better than before. That is very important.

Vasappa Mahesh: We heard that a lot of service providers are interconnected to many cities but looking at the ground level they reach the cities but they don’t get distributed in the cities. All the operators reach the central stations, but how do they distribute from there? They don’t have an answer. It should be looked at seriously.

KS Srinivasan: As regards SLAs, they are shortly likely to be provided by us. We (BSNL) have already tried to have a practical model which is realistic and within our capabilities and to that extent services are bound to improve. As regards connectivity beyond the hub, connectivity is there right up to the remotest corner in the state and I am sure the situation is exactly the same in other states as well.

Rajankutty Nair: SLA was never used as a terminology in India for the international network, the bandwidth, and that will come and the customer is going to be the king and they are going to dictate the terms especially with respect to SLAs and it is going to happen very shortly. Second is the issue with respect to coordination between systems integrators and service providers. It is a very serious issue. We will soon get it resolved. That will be a thing of the past.

G Dhananjayan: Over the period of two to three months probably all the monopolistic or restrictive trade practices will go away. Integration of systems providers and service providers have to take place. And that can happen only when there is no restriction in regulation, and absolutely no regulatory confusion.

S Srinivas: You have to sit with the customers, understand their requirements, what sort of solutions they want. At Tatas, we believe that we don’t sell readymade garments; we tailor it for individual corporate customers.

AN Rao: The questions we are asking service providers here are no different from the questions we face internally. If you really see the balance score card today we are measured on improvement of customer satisfaction. An enterprise may have couple of hundred projects, there is interaction of customers, we deal with individual customized SLAs with projects.

Dr Utpal Chattopadhyay: Somebody mentioned about eight locations in Bangalore. It has become a menace. We have one location in Hyderabad, another in Bangalore, the ISDN link between Bangalore and Hyderabad is very temperamental. You cannot imagine the anguish we have if we have a major customer visiting one center and he wants to talk to the other center. Somebody spoke about 99.8 or 96.8. The world is moving to five 9s, which means two hours downtime a year. We cannot be a $50 billion industry unless these things are solved in toto. Our major task is not to figure out whether the network is running or not. Our major task is to know how to increase productivity.

AN Rao: If our customers require ten times the bandwidth what they need or what we are using currently, if that is the requirement, we have to be with them and service providers have to be with us. The current technology allows us to do that. Those are the things which will help us to cater to business on demand. We have to address customers’ requirements and demand fluctuates a lot.

Dr Utpal Chattopadhyay: I would want service providers to knock at our doors periodically every quarter, asking what needs we have.

Nareshchandra Laishram