SPs need to improve delivery time and adherence to SLAs

Reliance Infrastructure, part of the Reliance Anil
DhirubhaiAmbani Group, is one of the largest private sector enterprises in power
utility and a major player in the infrastructure sector of India. The company is
currently developing fifteen projects totaling around Rs 28,000 crore. This
excludes investment in the distribution business. Reliance Infrastructure is
also developing five airports and two urban infrastructure projects. It is
planning to set-up a 20 mn ton cement plant over the next five years. VOICE&DATA
spoke to Prashun Dutta, Sr executive VP, quality & IT, Reliance Infrastructure
about the ICT needs of the company. Excerpts

Being
a power company, you rely on strong billing solutions. Who are your storage and
switch partners?

Reliance Infrastructure distributes more than 28 bn units of electricity to
25 mn consumers across different parts of the country, including Mumbai and
Delhi, in an area that spans over 1, 24,300 sq kms. We also generate 941 MW of
electricity from our power stations located in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh,
Kerala, Karnataka and Goa. So to maintain such a huge customer base and billing
solutions, we use HP 24000 series storage with Cisco made SAN switches.

What should be the key focus areas for
a communications service provider when it comes to meeting the need of an
enterprise?

We have services from various service providers, and are fairly satisfied
with the quality of service. However, IT being one of the most crucial elements
of the business, back-up services are also mandatory and are in place. As ARPU
falls and the cost of service per user increases, the telecom industry will need
to provide better customer services to retain their existing customers. Services
providers need to improve delivery time, adherence to SLAs and enhance their
quality of service.

Being a power and infrastructure
company, what kind of ICT infrastructure do you have?

Reliance Infrastructure is India's leading infrastructure company with
strong credentials in the power and infrastructure sector spanning across
generation, transmission, distribution, trading of electricity as well as
engineering, construction and procurement (EPC) of power plants; and
construction and development of urban infrastructure like metro rails, highways
and real estate projects.

We have deployed various state-of-the-art
technologies like geographic information system (GIS), distribution management
system (DMS), outage management system (OMS), supervisory control data
acquisition (SCADA), automatic meter reading, etc, for efficient central
monitoring and controlling its vast spread electricity distribution business. It
is the first Indian utility to have implemented remote control of its
electricity assets. To achieve this objective RInfra is using various
communication technologies like OFC, SDH, WCDMA, EDGE, MPLS VPN, VSAT, etc.

Reliance ADA Group is known for green
initiatives. Can you please share with us.

The various green initiative projects, awareness programs taken by Reliance
Infrastructure includes consolidation of servers at data center through
virtualization and disposal of e-waste through qualified and government approved
e-waste handler. At Reliance Infrastructure, we have compliant with policies and
procedures of ISO 14001. We have also replaced High Pressure Mercury Vapor (HPMV)
street Lamp to High Pressure Sodium Vapor (HPSV) Lamp under the clean
development mechanism (CDM).

RInfra has also installed automatic power
factor correction (APFC), automatic meter reading and equipment monitoring
system at various substations and capacitor banks at the high value/premium
consumer end to reduce the technical losses, thus, subsequently improve consumer
awareness to reduce energy bills.

We have also started the 'Bachat Lamp
Yojana' for migrating the retail consumers from conventional lamps to CFL. Our
awareness programs include 'I WILL, MUMBAI WILL' advertisement campaign, 'YOUNG
ENERGY SAVERS' where energy conservation awareness workshops are organized by
RInfra employees in Mumbai schools and colleges. We are also setting up wind
farms and solar farms for the generation of power through conventional sources.

How many offices, stations and
sub-stations do you have? How do you manage seamless connectivity across all
your offices?

RInfra's Mumbai distribution business is spread across a wide area of suburban
Mumbai with 110 business offices, sixty receiving stations and 5,000 odd
substations housing switchgears and transformers that are centrally monitored
and controlled through various state-of-the-art technologies. Provisioning of
seamless connectivity is a major challenge. Most of the locations across Mumbai
are covered through optic fiber network, and the rest of the locations are
covered through virtual private network (VPN) through wireline/wireless/VSAT
connectivity. We are also considering using high speed Internet cards for VPN
connectivity using the latest technological innovation in UTM devices.

How will technologies like 3G and WiMax
help in meeting your business needs?

Presently, most of the companies in India are facing bottlenecks in meeting
the business and operational needs due to technological limitations, bandwidth
availability, high cost, etc. Latest technologies like 3G, WiMax, and LTE, etc,
will offer triple play services; thus, helping the industry to overcome the
above bottlenecks at competitive prices.

The above services will help in providing
voice, video and data services on the move. Accordingly, this will help in
implementing unified communications.

Post 3G launch, what are the
technological upgradations are you considering?

We shall be implementing unified communications system and security access
control system once 3G services are launched. We are working on the investment
plans for the same.

What is the ICT spending as a
percentage of your turnover? How was it affected during the downturn?

1% of our turnover is spent on ICT. The recession was a blessing in
disguise. We used the period of recession for review, consolidation and
deployment of newer technologies at better commercials. We also used this period
to introspect and enhance the usage of ICT towards driving cost efficiency
within the organization.

Wireless has grown rapidly in the past
few years. What kind of issues and challenges has it thrown up, especially in
terms of network security and management?

We have not faced any challenge in implementing wireless technologies due to
our robust IT security policy framework and stringent governance. We are ISO
27001 certified and are under going CMM-I certification.

Name the top five technologies that you
think are going to make a mark in the future?

The key technologies that will make a mark in the future are messaging,
unified communications, triple play, 3G and 4G. But, we feel that the future
technologies like WiMax and LTE will also make a mark.

Akhilesh Shukla

akhileshs@cybermedia.co.in