The adoption of web 2.0 will be the next major step in the evolution of telco 2.0

How do you view market opportunities for enterprise VAS demands in India?

Total VAS market in India is $1.5 bn and voice VAS market is around $500 mn.
Enterprises are taking up telemarketing to a new definition, with mobile
marketing to address masses, and the turnaround time is very quick. It's not
required to get people at one place for mass communication. With urban
teledensity going up to forty, you can understand how mobile handsets are the
key to enterprises.

The adoption of web 2.0 concepts and technologies in both carrier and the
enterprise market, will be the next major step in evolution of telco 2.0, for
those carriers seeking to offer VAS to enterprises. We feel carriers want to
deepen their relationship with their enterprise customers, and to further
monetize their network assets in the process. The enterprise market represents
high value services for the carrier; as many of these customers will pay a
premium for availability, reliability, and quality of service. The current
mainstream offerings for the enterprise market are based around capacity and
hosted services, sometimes complemented by IT outsourcing projects. The
challenge for carriers (and particularly mobile operators) up to now has
been-how to offer services that can deepen the relationship with the enterprise,
by increasing the scope of their service offerings.

In your view, which killer VAS applications (like SMS, ring tones, etc) in
the future will have mass appeal and mass market?

The next killer apps might be mobile TV or simply video /audio broadcast
solution, that too in vernacular language since it appeals to most people. With
the country being crazy about cricket and bollywood, we might see people going
for more clips on their mobile.

As mobile has been a great medium to converge all services, all Internet
based applications and m-commerce applications will be the ones, that will be
killer VAS applications. Any commercial content applications will be killer
applications, that will be a new revolution in the market.

Any new, innovative VAS products/services in the pipeline from your
company?

Our platform is designed to cater to today's and tomorrow's solutions, in
terms of 2G moving on to 3G, and so on. Most of the new technologies that are in
the horizon are being planned to be supported, as part of our strong roadmap. As
there is a serious intention at converging technologies for the market in this
domain, we have a solid platform that will cater to this new requirement from a
hardware and software perspective.

Indian VAS market offers enormous market potential for companies like you.
How do you leverage them?

Our strength is home-grown signaling hardware and SS7 stacks, that can be
used by MVAS community for all voice VAS solution; and our USP is that we can
tailor our offerings to MVAS players. Most of today's MVAS players are from
India, and that's a great advantage. Since VAS is a big market, specifically in
India, we have the advantage of customizing the needs of VAS players to meet
specific market needs; and these in turn can be a value addition to outside
markets too. Since we have taken a look at where the telecom industry is
treading, and how we can converge the requirements to be addressed on a single
platform-this would be a great USP for us. Since we have made our platform
modular, supporting new technologies will be a lot more easier compared to rest
of the competition. The other area of key differentiation is-our services that
are unique in nature, and help operators and solution integrators to consider
our platform.

Kannan K

kannan@cybermedia.co.in