VOICE SOLUTION: Flush with Call Center Orders

Comment

Digg

Del.icio.us

The overall enterprise voice solutions market size in India for the FY 2002–03 was estimated at Rs 820 crore. PBX remains the dominant contributor to the voice solutions market with an estimated business of Rs 450 crore, which was the same as in the previous year. The KTS market is estimated at Rs 50 crore. The rest was shared by IP-PBX, wireless PBX (DECT) and other call center components. The year 2002–03 saw Tata Telecom emerging as the dominant player, edging past Siemens and recording a revenue of Rs 244 crore, which formed 75 percent of the company’s total sales last year. As a strategy, the company increased its focus on services, which formed a major chunk of its revenues.

Most of the players benefited from the call center boom. This can be gauged from the fact that Tata Telecom did a business of Rs 86.21 crore by supplying to call centers alone with orders worth Rs 23.10 from Dell International Services and Rs 14.24 crore from Reliance.

Major Customer Wins
Vendor	Customers
Tata Telecom	Dell International Services, Reliance, Wipro Spectramind, ICICI Bank, JP Morgan, Intelenet, Daksh, Patni Computers, Epicenter Technologies
Nortel	Hinduja TMT, HCL BPO Services, Digital Global Soft, Progeon, ICICIOnesource, CitiBank, Stanchart
Ericsson	ICICI Bank (4,000 lines), IIT Kanpur (5,500 lines) Sahara Corporation (3,000 lines), Accenture and BHEL Trichy.
Alcatel	STMicroelectronics, Paharpur Business, JMI, HSBC, IIT Delhi (3,000 lines)
Cisco	Transworks (400 seats ) Phoenix Global Interactions
Siemens	NA

The fiscal also saw the completion of a deal between Alcatel and the local management of Alcatel’s networking business in India called ABS India. The company, which sells OmniPCX Office for small and medium businesses (SMBs) and OmniPCX 4400 for large operations, managed to do a business of Rs 50 crore. On the other hand, Nortel, another leading player in the enterprise voice market, recently created an enterprise business group focusing on product development and sale of traditional and IP voice gear besides offering integration solutions. Hinduja decided to deploy Nortel’s enterprise call center solutions to its BPO unit in Bangalore with about 600 seats. South Indian Bank also chose to deploy Nortel Networks’ converged IP solution to connect 150 branches in India. Cisco deployed its IPCC solutions at Transworks, Accenture, and Phonix and did a business of around Rs 15 crore.

IP Is Here, and It’s the Future

IP-enabled and pure IP voice and data switches are the talk of the town. While an IP-enabled EPABX is basically a circuit switch with an IP interface, a pure IP EPABX is designed based on an IP platform. While both can enable VoIP, the former would permit a limited number of communication channels over IP and would require an intervening operator. Also, adding an IP line card into the EPABX shelf would offer no real advantage since all the drawbacks of the existing TDM platform of the EPABX, viz. limited scalability, high cost of integration and high administration and management costs remain.

On the other hand, a pure IP-based platform would incorporate RAS functionality and will allocate a unique IP address for each telephone, thereby permitting free and transparent connectivity with the IP world, with the need for an intervening operator. The key point here is that IP offers unlimited functionality and applications that an enterprise would surely need for achieving its business goals more efficiently and cost-effectively. For example, an IP EPABX would allow companies to do such things as video-conferencing and unified messaging from a single platform. More importantly, upgrades are easy and less costly on nonproprietary, open-standard platforms, on which IP-EPABXs are based, unlike the traditional switches that rely on vendor-owned closed and proprietary standards. This essentially means that if an enterprise wants to integrate new applications into the solution, it can always look for any vendor. On the other hand, the traditional EPABX, with their closed and proprietary architecture, bind the user to one vendor for all adds and changes.

Going the IP way is giving organizations a competitive edge over their competitors. Even though initial investments are still high, IP does help in reducing costs by offering single network advantage from day one, leveraging existing WAN for intra office traffic, lower costs of moves adds and changes and management. Moreover, it can also facilitate a truly mobile enterprise as it enables employees to access applications and full functionalities from anywhere in the world. IP also offers better disaster management capabilities that can ensure business continuity in case of a disaster.

Siemens’s enterprise networks division (ICN EN) launched HiPath 3000, a next-generation EPABX/KTS, as the company did some good business. While orders grew by 25 percent and revenues were up 24 percent over the previous year, profits improved substantially. Apart from HiPath 3000, ICN EN launched several new offerings such as the HiPath Procenter, a call center suite, and Optipoint 500—a next-generation Workpoints family. ICN EN also forged alliances with Talisma in the call center segment and with Avhan to offer call center CRM solutions to be integrated into the Siemens Procenter call center suite.

Nortel Networks, whose product lines Meridien I and Succesion CSE 1000 platform suffered some erosion in their acceptance, launched Succession CSE MX server, with IP telephony features. Release 2 of Succession 1000 with increased functionality did manage to get some acceptability. The march towards IP enablement gained some momentum with a number of call centers and some corporates going for IP-enabled voice solutions. According to Frost & Sullivan, the market for IP PBX will grow from its present 2.7 percent of the total PBX market revenues to almost 84.4 percent in 2007. The Asia-Pacific market, according to the same report for IP PBX, will be worth $1.55 billion by 2007. NEC, recognizing the importance of IP, and the lead taken by Avaya and Nortel, launched its IP PBX known as the NEAX 2000 Internet Protocol Server (IPS).

IP Makes Some Headway
Cisco led in terms of total IP deployments. The other big slice of the pie was shared by Avaya and Nortel. While Cisco gained in terms of its acceptability as a leading IPBX vendor, its support for analog systems did not offer cost-effectiveness, thus leading to lower uptake of IP. According to analysts, while Cisco is better placed in the short-term market, its success depends on whether it enhances the CallManager’s generic software package.

V&D estimates

CyberMedia Research

Outlook for 2003–04
As most of the call centers are in the ramp-up mode and consolidations are bound to happen, there won’t be major new purchases. The demand for IP-PBX is growing day by day and industry pundits are of the view that the equipment will form the next wave in the enterprise voice equipment market. It would be too early to say that the market is moving towards IP, as there has been only a marginal increase in IP deployment. However, the coming year is likely to see an increase in the deployment of IP-enabled systems. As the market grows, it is expected that prices of IP-based solutions will fall and the gap with the traditional PBX will get narrower. WPBX market, wherein Ericsson is one of the leaders, is expected to gain momentum in the next few years. Siemens plans to introduce a number of highly innovative products and solutions in the areas of call centers, cordless mobility, and convergent voice, data and video communications in the coming year.

The conventional PBX market may record a negative growth, it is opined, given the tilt towards IP. This may lead to a further decline in the per port pricing. On the regulatory front, much is to be done. Currently, the government prevents combining of the two networks and IP telephony is permitted only for CUG.

Sudesh Prasad