'The command and control room business in India is struggling'

Why is command and control room business struggling in the Indian market?

Currently, the control room's business in India is struggling on 3 major fronts. First and foremost is the lack of experience in implementing the state-of-the-art control room infrastructure without compromising on the form and functionality. Second is the issue of standardization of control room with respect to functionality and product. Finally, the challenge of availability of end to end solution provider in the Indian market who understands the following aspects in a control room-interiors, audio visual, and data mining. Most organizations looking to deploy a control room solution, approach a traditional audio visual systems integrator who have an experience deficit on the data mining and analytics portion. This leads to creating a 'good-looking' control room with not enough data to showcase. Typically, a control room implementation is a combination of IT, audio visual, and professional services, which together give the 'complete control room experience'. Add to this the dimension of providing the control room as a service to organizations.

Which sector do you think will benefit the most from this technology? And how?

It is very evident that 'data'-intensive sectors like BPO, IT, infrastructure, and manufacturing will benefit the most from the technology to set up command and control centers.

AGC has collaborated with AVI-SPL's Control Room Group for control room business. How are you planning to leverage this relationship?

There are a lot of innovations in the Indian network operators space in terms of data rendition in various formats. Rather than just looking at a control room as an expensive collection of displays, we are looking at rendering data in various formats in various devices viz. tablets, mobiles, etc. Secondly, there is a big shift towards IP/Network-centric NOCs, which gives the capability of collaborating between NOCs and operators within the NOC across centers. This also means that creating DR NOCs and having a BCP in place is far easier.