Voice Solutions: Where Is The Winner?

Service providers in India are going out of their way for

offering TDM-based Centrex services, not just to enterprises, but also to group

housing societies. In fact, for the consumers, in select cases for now, the

facility is free. With hosted Centrex, enterprises can opt for free calls within

a city for as low as Rs 50 per month per line.

The advantages of hosted voice through Centrex are of

course tremendous. There are no heavy down payments to be made for buying the

PBX boxes, there are no maintenance costs, and there is no need for buying a

bigger box, if the company experiences set up new branches.

But, as Chetan Natekar, consultant, Cisco Systems India and

SAARC says, the hosted Centrex market in India is immature. And in its current

avatar it is likely to remain immature, because of the growth of IP PBXs. Ankur

Lal, CEO of Infozech software says that the IP PBX and the hosted IP Centrex

definitely compete with each other.

Though the penetration level of IP PBXs remains in single

digit, equipment vendors are pitching that as business needs to grow and the

businesses mature, more and more enterprises will opt for IP PBXs. There is good

reason to say this because IP is the future of communications, and almost

everybody is now on an irrevocable march in that direction. In this scenario,

the equipment vendors are meeting with the needs of the enterprises. They not

only provide hardware for these services, but in many cases they also provide

the applications or software that runs on the PBX boxes. The telcos have been

reduced to providing a data pipe for these revolutionary boxes.

But in India...



Internationally, obsolete equipment of the service providers has prevented

them from offering hosted IP service to their customers. In India, however, the

state of the equipment is not a big issue. Sandip Gupta concurs that the

hardware with the telcos can very well offer hosted Centrex and VoIP services to

the customers. He should know as he is trying to rope in service providers to

deploy his applications, which includes hosted VoIP. Even otherwise, feature

servers or virtual Centrex applications such as those from Sylantro and

Broadsoft can easily run the Centrex application from a service provider's

data networks. No more hardware needed.

Tailormade versus Readymade



The organizations' needs are changing. They don't just need to talk with

their colleagues; they want to collaborate with them. They may not always want

to just speak with them, but also may want to chat, collaborate, and use video

in their communications. The voice based Centrex does not offer these. So, when

an organization needs these services, it goes ahead and deploys its own IP

network. It is surely a bother, but apparently it is worth it.

With IP PBXs one can migrate gradually, if the need be,

while the IP Centrex approach is typically a larger conversion. However,

ownership of the IP PBX gives enterprises more freedom as they can freely move

between different service service providers. IP Centrex has better survivability

because it can keep gong on regardless of the state of maintenance at the

enterprise's side.

And, especially if the Centrex service provider is not an

entrenched incumbent, new features are available to IP Centrex subscribers

immediately upon release, relieving them of upgrade hassles and version

compatibility problems. This can be of vital importance for an organization that

has multiple branch offices. Ensuring that the systems at each office are

compatible with all the other can actually require the setting up of a separate

branch office.

In terms of cost, every organization must make its own

decision based on its business cycles and requirements. The IP Centrex provider

will obviously charge for any and every value-added service. However, it would

also protect the customer from maintenance and upgrading costs.

In terms of future expansions too, enterprises must weigh

the possibility that their Centrex provider may not keep pace with all the new

developments. And, the service provider may not be too willing to accommodate

and avant-garde customer. But, outsourcing this activity will protect them from

the increased complexities of managing a growing network. Enterprises are

rightly concerned that with a hosted model, they will loose control over their

private network. However, with the IP Centrex, most of the MACD can be delegated

to the customer, and the customer can control most of the routine changes over a

Web-based interface.

Who Takes What?



Of course, the hosted model is best suited for small and medium businesses.

The larger organizations can justify keeping in place-dedicated resources for

running the large IP PBX. Of course, in many cases, the scale and complexity of

these enterprises owned IP PBXs could rival the set up of the IP Centrex

services being offered by the service providers.

Sandip Gupta runs his company's operations in India as

well as in the US. He comments on how the Centrex service providers are creating

a space for themselves in markets such as the US and Europe: for IP Centrex or

any such hosted service, there is a push and a pull in the market. The service

providers are looking to provide value-added services. They want to try many and

hopefully some will succeed. They want to continue to add new services and

increase their ARPU. On the other hand, technology is complex and innovations

are happening everyday, it is getting very difficult for the SMB to keep pace or

to have fulltime staff for managing it. So they want to outsource.

Ankur Lal elaborates, right not now, on an IP PBX you will

probably not give 5 language options on an IVR, but on a hosted Centrex you

could get a choice of 20 languages. Of course this can be replicated on an

on-premise IP PBX, but the scale of economies does not allow and does not make

it attractive to an SMB.

Will it Work?



That is the dilemma every idea faces just before it goes boom or bust.

Equipment vendors are also facing the classical dilemma of which way to go. The

IP PBX market is booming, but the uptake has not been too fast. In comes the

applications service providers. They are offering solutions where anybody with

data hosting capability can become a hosted IP Centrex provider. For all you

know, after its success with VPN, a new operator on the lines of Sify may

entrench itself in this new field. Its success may attract other smaller players

or even ISPs to the business, and when it starts succeeding, the telcos may

fight back to get back their customers.

Regulation Strangulation



Starting from the days when VoIP was not allowed within the enterprise, the

environment has eased out a lot as far as IP telephony and convergence of

networks is concerned, in India. A little delayed perhaps, but we in India have

kept pace with the technological changes happening all over the world. The next

frontier is of course the rise of converged networks in India.

The benefits of IP can be fully realized when there is full

convergence. Currently, only the large organizations can find the economies of

scale to justify large-scale IP deployments. However, once full convergence is

let loose, the small enterprises are likely to find the hosted IP Centrex

facility more attractive.

Alok Singh



aloksi@cybermedia.co.in