'Coupled with user's view, IP can offer unmatched services'

Andrew Murray, VP, service provider, Asia-Pacific Theatre, Cisco Systems

Has IP penetrated the service provider space the way you expected it to a
couple of years ago?

We have seen a general trend of acceptability about IP. But more importantly,
there has been a qualitative change. In the past, many service providers
considered IP fit just for the Internet. Of late, they have realized that IP
provides them many more advantages–it helps them build high-revenue services
and improve their buisness-to-business offerings. Now, even incumbent operators
are looking at IP for making their businesses better. Voice over IP is a good
example. IP is being seen as a service infrastructure and not just an Internet
infrastructure.

Of late, whenever one talks about the slowdown and mistakes committed by
carriers, one invariably hears about the West. For success stories, it is China,
Korea, and Japan...

Take the US service provider market place. There was such a huge over
investment. There was a lot of unmanaged capital following into the market
place. Just everyone and anyone was entering the service provider business even
though they neither had a business plan nor any understanding of the market. So
the crash was imminent.

Many say Cisco bet too much on the potential of the CLECs which did not
take off the way they were expected to....

Well. That is natural. When new carriers come in and want to challenge the
incumbents, they want to build their networks in a new way, which is most
cost-effective and efficient. So many CLECs came to Cisco for their networks.
There is no doubt about that. In fact, in some degree, it hindered our working
with the incumbents. That was in the US.

And it has been maintained by your competitors that though IP is efficient
and cost-effective, the reason why it is a choice for tomorrrow and not today
because the services are not yet available...

We have a different view point. What services are they talking about?
Earlier, telecom services meant just connectivity. And the definition of these
services were derived from managing this connectivity from a technology point of
view. Today, that has changed. You understand the needs of your customer–business
or residential–and try to deliver that to him. That could be unified
messaging, VPN or videoconferencing. And when you define services from users’
point of view–what he needs–show me what else can even remotely match IP’s
capability?

Shyamanuja Das