VAS Asia : On a Strong Foot

Asia's largest convention on business of mobile value added services

assembled key players and other major stakeholders in the telecom industry in

July 2009, in New Delhi. The conference was aimed at exploring and examining the

role of VAS and figuring out new prospects in this space.

The conference had four sessions. Some of the speakers included RN Prabhakar,

member, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai); Arvind Rao, chairman,

chief executive officer and co-founder, On Mobile; SS Sirohi, deputy director

general, VAS, BSNL; Jyoti Handa, regional sales director, South Asia, Dialogic

Corporation and various representatives from Aircel, Idea Cellular and other VAS

companies.

At the 5thVAS Asia 2009, international conference and exhibition, RN

Prabhakar of Trai said, “Mobile growth is now shifting to non-urban and rural

areas. However, we will have growth only when operators decide to move from push

concept to pull concept”

Rahul Saighal, chief marketing officer, Aircel, said, “VAS should be made

available to the lowest strata of subscribers in rural area”

While giving his keynote address Arvind Rao of OnMobile said that the VAS

industry will be prepared for every conceivable service which can be possible on

a mobile handset.

“For the first time we will be introducing a new technology, 'mobile search'

which will be based on voice recognition technology and Android application

named social address book,” Rao said

Other speakers shared the idea of having a single platform where all services

available with an operator can be listed. The other challenge which VAS is

expected to face in terms of entertainment content will be films, news casts or

TV serials for mobile phones. “While the demand for such content is there, the

challenge is the availability of bandwidth and spectrum,” said Uday Sodhi, chief

executive officer, New Media, Balaji Telefilms. Rajat Mukarji, chief corporate

affairs officer, Idea Cellular emphasized on the roles that industry needs to

play with mobile number portability coming in.

The event attracted various stakeholders in the sphere of ICT including

telecom service providers, VAS technology and platform companies, telecom

associations and regulators, VAS consulting research organizations and

multimedia service providers. Talking about the future directions, Shyam

Mardikar, senior vice president, network services, Bharti Airtel said, “In the

future, technology will get faster and denser, and service providers will

aggregate and simplify business models with the increase in competition.”

Explaining about the objectives of managed VAS, Amber Sur, CMO and EVP,

Comviva said, “Increase in service uptime and service penetration, managing VAS

partners and capacities, reducing charges and reconciliation issues, reducing

churn rate, implementing uniform customer experience, using business

intelligence and cross selling are some of the key objectives of managed VAS

services.”

Archana Singh



archanasi@cybermedia.co.in