Networking the Gurudwaras

As one drives towards Connaught Place from South Delhi, what meets the eye on

the way are two beautiful structures standing tall amidst many government and

commercial high rises that line this part of the city. The Gurudwara Rakab Ganj

and Gurudwara Bangla Sahib are no doubt among the holiest shrines of Sikhism in

the country. These, along with Gurudwara Sheesh Ganj and Gurudwara Nanak Piyao,

form the pillars and centres of Sikhism in Delhi and the surrounding areas.

These

Gurudwaras are managed by a democratically-elected body called the Delhi Sikh

Gurudwara Management Committee (DSGMC) with Jathedar as the head of the

committee. This body manages a labyrinth of activity almost akin to a large

business enterprise, of four widely-located Gurudwaras with immensely busy

schedules. And an approximate wealth of Rs 100 crore to handle–receipt and

disbursement to be accounted–in a year. Activities include receiving the visit

of 12,050 devotees on a normal day and as many as 26,300 on a holy day,

accounting of donations in both cash and kind, administration of the prasad

preparation and distribution process, and administration of the langar

distribution, apart from the holier jobs like management of the sanctum

sanctorum and the various practices associated with the prayers.

The DSGMC also has the additional responsibility of managing twenty eight

educational institutions that the Sikh community has built under the aegis of

the Gurudwaras. And overseeing several community projects.

The Gurudwaras’ Requirement

Over the years, the DSGMC has accumulated a lot of wealth–and because of

manual recording, it was becoming difficult to efficiently quantify this wealth.

Unofficial claims are that as many as Rs 20 crore are pilfered every year. Then

there was an ever-burgeoning traffic of devotees visiting the shrine and with it

the logistics that go in providing access to them, receiving donations from

them, providing prasads and langars to them, etc. It was getting too complex to

be handled on a manual basis alone.

The present Jathedar of the DSGMC, Avtar Singh Hit, looked for a solution.

And found it in networking. The most important thing that the Gurudwara

committee wanted was to bring order and efficiency into the management and

administration of the holy places, and their associated places of learning.

The Solution

Multiple Zones India Pvt Ltd was selected as the network and systems

integrator for the provisioning of the solution. The solution that was offered

and is in now in its final implementation stage, is based on open platforms and

involves both LAN and WAN, apart from the IT hardware and software installed.

Reliability, affordability and simplicity are the essence of the solutions

provided. The complete system was to be reliable enough both to improve the

information availability and logistics and not delay the daily processes. The

cost of ownership of the infrastructure was to be optimum–neither too costly

nor inadequate. And importantly, the entire IT/network infrastructure was to be

simple enough to be run and maintained by a team that was relatively new to

technology.

The project involved setting up LANs at each of the Gurudwaras and a WAN

connecting these LANs as well as the local servers in the educational

institutions. Gurudwara Rakab Ganj which houses the DSGMC’s central office was

to be the central site of the WAN, housing two separate central servers which

would maintain the centralized repositories–one central server for the

Gurudwaras and the other for the educational institutions.

The

LANs in the Gurudwaras were built using the passive structured cabling systems

of Avaya, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet/Fast Ethernet switches of Allied Telesyn, and

racks of HCL. The IT hardware installed was from IBM and was based on the

Windows 2000 platform. The back end included SQL database systems and the

front-end was designed on Visual Basic. The reporting system was from Crystal.

The LAN at Gurudwara Bangla Sahib has a provision for accepting credit card and

cheques for donations as well. The central servers at Rakab Ganj have been put

behind a Linux-based firewall. The LANs deployed at the Gurudwaras have a total

number of five servers and sixty PC nodes apart from printers and scanners.

These LANs deployed at the Gurudwaras are unique in the sense that they are

horizontal by nature with widely dispersed nodes–located at distances as much

as 400 meters and beyond.

To the credit of the networking team from Multiple Zones, it provisioned a

unique solution that would work out best considering both cost and the LAN

complexity. It proposed and implemented Ethernet 2 wire modem links to these

remotely located nodes within the campuses–thus saving on the costs. Patton

modems were used for this purpose.

The local servers at all the Gurudwaras and the educational institutions

connect to the two central servers at Gurudwara Rakab Ganj through dedicated

ISDN dial-in links. There is a 3Com ISDN RAS installed at the central site to

dial-in from the various remote servers. The information that is captured at the

time of the transactions every day, accumulates at the local server which is

uploaded on the central servers through dial-up ISDN links using 3Com modems, at

the end of the day. The Multiple Zones team decided on ISDN as the WAN link as

it met the requirement from the DSGMC for a latency period of one day between

the local servers and the repositories.

Future Plans

As the final stages of the networking of these Delhi-based Gurudwaras

continue, the people who are actually going to run the network tomorrow, are

being educated and trained by Multiple Zones. The entire project is slated for

completion by June. Today, the DSGMC has to its credit implemented India’s

first online networked religious organization. Tomorrow, one may even see it

pioneering to establish cutting-edge technologies like video streaming and IP

radio station, to spread the Gurubani across the oceans.

Nareshchandra Laishram

What is the Problem?

Let us start with stating the obvious. Most of the billing systems were

designed and built two or three decades ago. Much water has flowed under the

telecom bridge since then. Rigid regulations have given way to intense

competition. Telecom networks are jumping onto the IP bandwagon. And then there

is the ubiquitous Internet. With carriers moving into new vistas, offering whole

new breeds of services, these legacy billing systems (centralized and

batch-oriented) are not very easily changed, and as a result have become

expensive to maintain and modify, to adapt to the demands imposed by new

services. In other words, billing is no longer about sending an invoice and

collecting payment.

As the world of IP services continues to expand at a break-neck speed and

service providers look at offering new services for broadband, intelligent

networks, wireless, cable and Internet, it necessitates the need for new



billing systems to collect payment for these new revenue opportunities. This is
exactly where billing systems, hitherto considered unglamorous and simple, don a

new robe: a critical tool for marketing, customer care and revenue assurance.

What’s more, it is the billing and customer care infrastructure, which is

going to be the key differentiator in any service



delivery.

Billing, for long, has been defined as gathering data for customer use,

provisioning features, calculating costs and invoicing for payment. Though these

still remain the essential characteristic traits of a billing system, any

service provider worth its salt would vouch for the fact that billing has

emerged as a core function. Thanks to deregulation and technology, companies now

provide services beyond their core competency. With the demarcation line

blurring between wireless and wireline, service providers in the country are

foraying into multiple market segments, with multiple services. Billing comes to

the fore here as these new business opportunities are more challenging to

support and operate.

Emerging Killer App.

"The bill is today used as a medium to communicate with the customer

from a marketing and customer care point of view. The bill reflects and confirms

tariffing and service related assurances made to the customer at the time of

sale and his lifecycle with us," says Sheila Paul, DGM, IT of BPL Mobile

Communications. Brinda Sekhar, VP, IT and Enhanced Services, with Spice Telecom,

supports this: "Billing is a very powerful means of staying in touch with

the customer. With the current thrust on CRM, billing is a vital relationship

builder." But with many companies going in for CRM suites, the customer

care functionality in a billing system is redundant to some extent, adds Anil

Gajwani, VP, Technology and Information Systems, with Orange.

Here is another testimonial from Shiv Raichand, CTO of Esctotel, "

Though the billing system costs just 3-4 percent of the total capital cost, it

is criticality too high." Still skeptical? Take this from one of the

pioneers in telecom software in India, says, Prakash Deval, billing centers

manager with MBT says, "Billing data holds a wealth of information, which

can be effectively used to position the telcos products and services, and for

optimum utilization of the telcos infrastructure."

Perhaps the most discernible change is that customers are educated now and

are demanding new and innovative services and customized methods of information

processing/communications/trading. "With the advent of Internet-based

technology services offerings, billing systems are now at the forefront of the

strategic service revolution," says Kishore Kali, VP, e-business

infrastructure of Global Tele Systems Ltd.

The same sentiment is echoed by a study carried out by TeleStrategies Inc.,

which says that sophisticated subscribers, complex connectivity and competition

among carriers for fast-moving customers are what make billing a vital marketing

tool. The study points out that within billing systems, rating and discounting

functionality must accommodate the constant demand for new rating plans, product

bundles and promotions. In other words, your billing system offers you brand

loyalty among subscribers. But the caveat here is which billing system is

optimized for your services?

It all boils down to one thing: One single bill for the different services

offered. Points out Sheila Paul, " Most of the billing issues arise due to

billing systems not supporting market requirements and data capturing errors.

The most important consideration for telecom service providers today is the

billing system’s ability to charge for new and varied services through a

single bill."

Other issues that must be addressed when managing the billing system are

scalability, reliability and accuracy, to name a few. And you also need to

understand the gaps in the present billing system to bridge them. These can be

listed as the lack of flexibility and open interface with systems, frequency of

upgrades to support market demands and technological advancements. Sheila Paul

cuts it short thus: current billing systems are not geared towards allowing

flexible charging for data oriented services and for rating of third party

services.

Needless to say, the real ordeal for any billing system lies in the ability

to bill different services (local and long distance phone, Internet, wireless,

cable TV, etc) on a single bill. This clears the ground for convergent billing

or next-generation billing.

What is Convergent Billing?

How do you bill when your calls are free? This is a question which haunts

many of the service providers as voice revenues are southward bound while data

is spiraling heavenwards. The case in question is wireless carriers. With mobile

Internet and commerce emerging as the buzzwords, made possible by technologies

like GPRS, a mobile operator can no longer depend on his legacy billing system

to charge for these new revenue streams. Wireless Internet carriers need to

collect billing data from multiple network elements and third-party platforms.

Assume that a mobile operator takes GPRS service for 15 thousand subscribers.

This would mean that the operator has to spend Rs 78 lakhs on a billing gateway

alone, while the cost of other GPRS equipment works out to Rs 7.32 core. Though

GPRS is yet to take off in India and with operators planning to go in for a flat

fee in the initial period, this may not pose major problems for the existing

billing system. But GPRS demands are to be based on usage basis and not

duration, as is the case now. "Most of the billing vendors do offer

flexibility in terms of rating. But none of these systems have the proven

ability to meet the needs of the new breed of convergent and IP-enabled

services," says Anil Gajwani. The point is buttressed by Brinda Sekhar, who

says that the scalability of the system to handle growing volumes of data and

presentation in various formats are the other major billing issues for a

cellular service provider today. But a word of caution here from Shiv Raichand:

Whether the billing system should be totally changed depends on the operator —

whether the present system is capable of being upgraded to take care of the new

requirements.

Here is another example: Hughes tele.com, the basic service provider for

Maharashtra, is contemplating to roll out a host of new services like broadband,

limited mobility and Internet. "We can’t provide different bills for

different services to our customers. Obviously the challenge here is the

flexibility of the exiting billing systems to factor in these new services. As

of now, we don’t have a system to integrate all service charges into one

single customer invoice and this multi-dimension of new services is what makes

the existing billing system vulnerable," says Navin Bhasin, head of

customer care and revenue assurance with Hughes. There can be no greater

annoyance to the subscriber than getting over billed or billed twice a month and

then have to take out his precious time to visit the service providers office to

sort things out, quips Anandya Chakraborthy, senior consultant with Birla

Technologies. The hard fact is that if a billing system cannot support

next-generation services, then the carriers and content providers either cannot

properly synchronize the retail/wholesale equation or, even worse, simply cannot

offer the product.

"Most of the available billing systems now are typically home grown

legacy systems and lack flexibility, market responsiveness and are not customer

oriented, says Kishore Kali. Another key factor that needs to fall into place

for billing systems to support these new generation services: gathering data. If

it can’t be quantified, it can’t be billed is the rule of the game. This

holds truer with the introduction of IP technology and services, which are now

sending shock waves through the telecom industry. The difficulties IP billing

create center on the inability of telecommunications networks to distinguish

between the type of content being accessed or the application being used. For

example, the billing system may not be able to determine if the content is voice

or data, or is using application service provider supported applications or

e-mail. This is exactly where most of the incumbent billing vendors were caught

off guard.

Where to Look for Billing Solutions?

First, any service provider would need to understand his requirements before

looking out for a vendor. And would do themselves a favor by asking these

questions: which one is optimized for my services? Which one can handle my

business support requirements such as data collection, provisioning, credit

management, taxing, rating and others? Which one is flexible enough to

accommodate my future pricing strategies, service bundles and business models?

Which one integrates with the remainder of my OSS?

Many companies begin with the assumption that a premade system works. This

solution is appropriate for certain environments, but service providers must

find out who the best vendors are for their billing needs. It is vital to

understand how the software works and what it will bring to the business. Always

bear in mind the fact that the bill is the only interaction the subscriber has

with the service provider each month and is a main driver of customer loyalty.

Take a quick look at the expectations from the so-called next generation

billing before crossing the bridge. "The customer should be able to access

bills in any desirable format, with convenient payment options. Also, send

statements for post-paid customers (like we do for a segment of prepaid

customers)," says Brinda Sekhar. It should be an advanced solution to

deliver high levels of flexibility and automation for multi technology and multi

service environment. Also, it should support ad hoc invoicing, multiple billing

cycles, and store and process voice/data traffic. The billing must also be an

on-line, real-time system, sums up Kishore Kali. Another key factor is

mediation, with an interface to multiple network elements; online

filtering/convergence and aggregation of records; and GUI-based mediation

parameters.

Outsourced Vs. In-house Billing Solutions

When any service provider develops a new or updated billing strategy, one of

the most important questions to ask first is whether an outsourced or an

in-house solution is a better fit for the needs of the service provider. There

is not always a straightforward answer to this question, and there are many

things to consider when making this decision. There are differing views on this

crucial question: Is billing a core function? Can a service provider outsource

billing? Many service providers stand unanimous in their view that billing is

best outsourced rather than developed in-house as it is not their

core-competency. "Billing is no doubt a core function, but can be

outsourced only to vendors who have expertise in specific billing systems

deployed by the service provider. Outsourcing in India depends on the level of

guarantee the vendor can give a service provider on maintaining confidentiality,

accuracy, timely billing, the service providers’ definition of his core

capabilities and how he intends to service the customer," remarks Sheila

Paul. According to Brinda Sekhar, outsourcing billing can be a viable option,

although the final presentation and process may still be controlled by the

service provider. This would also encourage billing houses with expertise in

this area to introduce newer technologies and efficiencies gained from multiple

operators. The service provider, says Kali, that requires new or upgraded

billing systems must choose an appropriate role associated with their technical

competence and commission the correct relationship and technology suppliers. In

short, the option can be defined as either buy direct from technology suppliers

and integrators or employ system integrators to build a system and run it for

yourself.

It’s all Possible!

Preparedness. That is the key to survival for any service provider. They must

keep an eye on the future, when billing systems will be required to process much

more than just telecom products and services. Internet, broadband and wireless

markets are still developing. What’s more, newer technologies have not

introduced any complexity, as most additions such as cable or ISP services, have

involved flat or one-time fees. But that doesn’t leave any scope for

complacency. IP technology is wreaking havoc on the telecommunications industry

and complications are bound to arise with IP billing.

Changes in technology undoubtedly have introduced some complexity. But, on

the same breath, have solved other problems. Legacy systems are not necessarily

bad boys, as new protocols bridge the gap between operating systems, databases

and hardware. Thus, billing vendors can ease out of the debate about technology

and return to designing systems to alleviate billing problems.

Vendors

MT Jeevan