‘We have tremendous respect for the amazing competition that India offers’

With a global footprint and wide product portfolio, InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing service provider, is aggressively tapping the India market. When Voice&Data caught up with Jitesh Shah, CEO, Intercall India, he spoke about the company’s ten-year-long journey in the country and the road ahead.

Voice&Data: What are your plans for the India market?

Jitesh Shah: Our customer patronage has allowed us to be very successful in the last one decade here. India represents a very strong growth market for us and at a group level, there is 100% commitment in catering to the needs of Indian specific consumers. We are owned by a company called West Corporation and all the way up to West Corporation; there is a strong desire to continue to grow in India. We have established in top cities in the last one decade and now we are looking at other cities too.

West Corporation has a broad range of products and services, apart from what we currently offer in India.

We want to carry out customer studies to determine what our customers want and depending upon the feedback we will introduce relevant products, which will help us in our expansion plans and add more momentum to our expansion plans.

A lot of focus this year will be towards strengthening the partner model. For the benefit of customers we have always focused on--infrastructure and interface.

For us to be the best in the world, we have to continue to provide best –in-class infrastructure we cannot compromise on that and quality of service for our customers in India is non-negotiable.

In addition to infrastructure, we also focus on interface. Understanding that our customers today have a fairly young working age population and the desire is to have relevant cool and special app that can collaborate more easily providing a sleek and well-designed interface is a big motivator for us.

So, our focus will be on these two and we will continue to outpace the industry’s growth just like we have done in the past and this has helped us to further solidify our market share in India.

Voice&Data: How much market share do you have in India and how are you planning to increase it?

Jitesh Shah: We are not at a liberty to disclose that, but we have a sizable market share.

There are couples of things which have always helped us in driving our growth. Ten year ago, when we said that we want to set up shop in India, our global customers gave us the confidence saying: “there is a need of you guys in our Indian organizations why don’t’ you come down.” And that aspect was the big catalyst for us to be here.

Our focus was we do not offer conferencing as a commodity in the market but instead we go to our customers, sit down and conduct need analysis and we act as a consultant for our customers and propose what we believe to be the best for them.

We try to look and determine what the customer needs and believe in providing customized solutions to our customers.

Voice&Data: What is your key USP?

Jitesh Shah: We provide collaborative suits, audio and video services, web conferencing digital media services.

Our USP is that we act as a one-stop shop depending on what exactly our customer really needs and we are able to provide that. Our second USP is the extremely skilled sales organization that we have and that is able to talk to the CXO in various organizations and understand what their needs are and accordingly propose solutions.

Our third USP is our focus on--infrastructure and interface. The fact that we are able to connect to 196 countries is a big USP for us, the fact that we are global and can reach out to 83% of the fortune 100 companies is another USP for us.

Voice&Data: What type of business models do you have for India?

Jitesh Shah: We are in the business of providing a very highly integrated global software service SAP platform for unified communication and collaboration services for our customers in India. We predominantly focus on two types of customers:

1. Global customers who have a tie-up with us globally and they have a need for our services in India and we fulfill their needs.

2. Acquired by our direct channel, we provide them an advance platform that covers typical audio , web, video conferencing as well as enterprise resilent technologies.

3. In addition, we have a strong and well-designed integrated suite of products in digital media space, predominantly digital media is a broad term that predominantly features live streaming events which include both audio and video streams, archival solutions for our customers in the domain.

4. Interface surrounding this new age products have been very successful in 2014 and we are very confident that we will continue to grow in 2015 on the back of this and other cor.e products.

Voice&Data: Tell us something about your tie-ups?

Jitesh Shah: One of the things we are very good at around the world is our partner program. We have a very strong partner program. We believe in acting as a one-stop shop for our customers in India. Depending upon the needs of the customers whether Cisco, or Microsoft or a new age company, we strategically align services and products as per the needs.

We don’t have a third party app, we will be able to provide netted apps within your incumbent network and IT strategy.

We also have partner engagement with Reliance Communications with that we are further able to endorse in the domestic market and cater to our domestic customers. Since we have a lot of proprietary solutions it helps us engage with our partners in a strategic manner. And there is a constant value addition from both the sides in our relationship.

Voice&Data: Please elaborate on your tie-up with RCom.

Jitesh Shah: The partner model we have established with Reliance Communications is that of a wholesale model. We provide them with the best of class infrastructure interface again. All of these run on Reliance network. So, Reliance is taking it to the market, while the technology, R&D is done by us.

So, it’s a very symbiotic relationship we have with Reliance.

Voice&Data: What are your expectations ten years down the line from India market?

Jitesh Shah: We have a very strong and aggressive strategy in India catering to customers’ need here. Making customers happy is what we want to make sure and that would help us to grow higher than the industry.

We have tremendous respect for the amazing competition that the Indian market has to offer. Because we are the world’s largest and leading that puts us in a very sweet spot and allows us to innovate.