'Price and ease-of-operation will drive VoIP deployment'

As
part of a strategic move to reinforce its presence in India and establish a
local service and support base, VocalTec recently announced the appointment of
Alon Weinstein as the country manager. Weinstein has extensive ‘hands-on’
experience on projects involving large-scale operations management and has been
a business focal point for commercial operations in Europe, Africa and the
Middle East. He was initially based at the VocalTec headquarters, looking at the
operations in Africa. Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

How do you assess the market in India vis-à-vis VoIP?

Now that the market has opened up in April this year, there exists a tremendous
opportunity for VoIP solution vendors as well the VoIP service providers. But it
really depends on the bureaucratic issues from here on. In ILD, we already see
VoIP playing a major role. NLD is going to be the next area where VoIP will play
a major role in the near future. Since the tele-density is low, we foresee a lot
of deployment based on VoIP.

What do you think will drive the implementation of VoIP in India?

The main drivers will be price and operations. VoIP provides tremendous cost
reductions for service providers and on the operational front, VoIP-enabled
systems are far easier to operate and manage than the traditional ones. Also,
with VoIP becoming a mainstream technology worldwide, local players may have no
choice but to deploy VoIP-based solutions as well. The value-added services will
also become an important driver once the basic VoIP infrastructure is in place.

Is there something that can hamper the deployment of VoIP-based solutions
in India?

Security issues are the greatest concern of service providers in India. This
is causing a delay in VoIP deployment. But we recently came up with a solution
in association with Verint to address such issues…

What strategy will you be adopting?

We have already provided VoIP solutions to DataAccess in India. We are
chasing the large basic telephony licensees with a variety of solutions for ILD
and NLD. The softswitches we provide speak openly with various application
servers. This in turn allows the integration of various value-added services in
our solutions. On the network side, we would remain focused on the core and not
on at the last mile.

Do you anticipate softswitch deployments in cable networks in the near
future?

Since the cable networks are not widespread, no standard solution is
available. But the cable operators have a very big advantage of last mile, and
the demand from them for softswitches, depending on their networks, will surely
grow in the future.

Ashish Lakhanpal