The South Asian market is an important region for us

Can you give details on Aricent's pact with Nepal Telecom?

It's a multi-million dollar systems integration contract. Under this
contract, Aricent will provide convergent mediation and convergent interconnect
billing solutions that will enable a wide range of next generation communication
services. As a turnkey implementation provider offering supply, delivery,
installation and commissioning, Aricent will integrate systems, which together
enable next generation product and service offerings for both prepaid and
postpaid customers.

What are your future plans to tap the South Asian market?

The South Asian market is an important region for us as there are many
opportunities especially as 3G/4G roll out grows and operators look to create
valuable and differentiated services for their customers. If you look at a
market such as India, there is a lot of activity around the 3G and MNP rollout.
The challenge lies in the fact that operators need a fast ramp-up to a system
that can help them deliver the next generation of services. So they are looking
for domain experts who can act as their system integrators for the complete
solution-from concept to commercialization.

In the wake of 3G, what is the significance of systems integration in the
Indian telecom industry?

The most exciting thing about the 3G rollout is the differentiated and rich
services that operators will be able to offer to their customers-from VoIP on
the mobile devices to live streaming of video, music and more. The challenge
lies in the fact that the operators need a fast ramp-up to a system that can
help them deliver the next generation of services.

What technology trends do you visualize for the Indian domestic market
this year?

Collaboration and unified communications like immersive telepresence,
videoconferencing and other 'socialytic' or web 2.0 applications will witness
integrated build-outs. Acceptance and adoption of the 'Cloud' to grow as the
post-economic slowdown scenario will drive more organizations towards it. The
biggest driving trend is significant focus on delivering a great user
experience. More and more people are realizing that UE is not just about the
user interface. Beyond the UI, the UE is heavily dependent on factors such as
connectivity-as the available bandwidth directly affects the experience as well
as what services can be provided on the device. Performance optimization is also
key and with more moving parts today than ever before (display, power,
processor, radio chips etc), devices are complex and harmonizing (and not just
integrating) components is more important than ever. We see a lot of people
building Android based devices with a focus on providing a differentiated
experience to consumers. Extending that, since more and more people want a rich
multimedia experience on their mobile devices, there is a significant load on
the current network infrastructure which was formed before the YouTube and
iPhone era. Thus, we also see a move to higher speed 3G/4G networks.

Archana Singh

archanasi@cybermedia.co.in