NEWS & VIEWS: "Service providers are moving...to complete outsourcing"

Kannankote Srikanth, corporate vice president (worldwide network services),
network business, Motorola Inc. focuses on managed network services, a new
initiative of Motorola. In 2003, GNS contributed around $ 1billion in revenue.
Excerpts of the interview:

What is the focus of your new services division called GNS?

Earlier, Motorola was not looking at services as a business unit but with
service providers focusing on services, GNS division was created to focus on
product, support, and maintenance. GNS was created not only for life cycle
services but also for deployment and providing managed services that provides
full end to end services to service providers.

Presently this division has worldwide revenues of over a billion dollar and
is growing as operators are demanding more and more services from vendors.

Kannankote Srikanth

Indian operators are not different from worldwide operators as they want to
deploy at a faster pace and are looking at companies like Motorola for full
scale turnkey deployment of installation, commission, integration, and program
management. We have been optimizing CDMA and GSM network in a multivendor

environment. So from India perspective we not only sell but manage, install,
support, deploy, and optimize services.

How do you look at the services market worldwide as well as in India?

The services market in mature countries is growing at the rate of 10—15
percent. Indian service providers are also moving in the same direction and is
looking at how vendors can help in designing revenue generating models-right
from generating new services portfolio of what services to be offered that can
be customized and adapted for the Indian market.

In managed services, what is the direction that is being taken by service
providers?

In managed services, service providers are moving from network centric
approach to service centric approach and then to complete outsourcing. It is not
only the case with greenfield operators but also with mature operators who are
also looking at similar services.

What is the India strategy for GNS?

India is an emerging market and has bigger opportunity for services. We will
target 2/3 companies as official partner that will support us irrespective of
location. We are looking at partners in deployment and application area.

Pravin Prashant