Telcordia, one of the world's largest telecom software companies, has made its presence felt in India with three offices including full development labs. With over 800 patents and serving customers in over 55 countries, Telcordia's experience runs deep.
Telcordia Technologies India Private Limited (Telcordia India), a part of the Telcordia Technologies family of companies, provide open, flexible, and configurable software and services for IP, wireline, mobility and cable networks.
With their wide range of products and services, Telcordia is helping many of the world's largest carriers position their network operations to fully maximize emerging market opportunities and maintain their competitive advantage.
Convergence Plus spoke with Mr. Anuj Kapur, Country Head, India, Service Delivery Solutions, Telcordia to know more about their achievements, their work and plans for the future amongst other things. Few Excerpts—
You are the recipient of the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Award for 2010. What initiatives Telcordia is taking to maintain this position in the years to come?
Telcordia was very proud to receive this award jointly with Tata Docomo – it recognized Telcordia’s contribution to the fantastic success of Tata Docomo. Of course, neither we nor Tata Docomo are resting on our laurels: our Indian engineers continue to create innovative new services and plans to keep Tata Docomo growing faster than the market.
One of the crucial differentiators of the Telcordia Real-Time Charging solution is our flexible service creation environment, which allows our local teams to rapidly create new services for each of our customers. This empowers each customer to compete and innovate independently and rapidly. This level of innovation has been driving the Indian market forward and, we believe, will continue to do so.
Telcordia is continuing to invest in major new capabilities such as Telcordia® Bandwidth Manager and Telcordia® Personalized Advertising products as well as continued development of Telcordia Real-Time Charging with new features such as new bonus and discount packages as well as the focus on mobile broadband.
We hope that Global Telecoms Business will continue to recognize the innovation of our Indian customers in future years.
Telcordia has been very bullish in the mobile broadband space. What are your offerings for the Indian market as far as mobile broadband is concerned?
Telcordia is proud to be part of the fantastic growth of the Indian Mobile market with four major customers today. We firmly believe that mobile broadband will be the catalyst to further success not only for the network operations but, more importantly, in enabling exciting new services for Indian consumers and improved efficiencies for businesses.
Telcordia is focused on the challenges of mobile broadband around the world and ensuring that Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are able to deliver the experience that subscribers expect, at the price they want. Although every country is different, the major challenge worldwide is how to deliver services to all parts of the market, while allowing CSPs to make fair revenues. In India there has been a lot of discussion about how to make mobile broadband affordable for users whilst generating enough revenue to justify the investment in licenses and in network build. Telcordia believes the answer is not to expect users to spend more each month but to take a greater share of the users’ spend; by capturing, for example, a proportion of what users spend today on entertainment or business services.
Clearly, CSPs have a lot of decisions to make and pressure to make the right decision at the right time. Telcordia understands that the greater the challenge, the greater the need to get it right and has proven solutions that help CSPs on this path. For instance, Telcordia® Real-Time Charging and the Telcordia® Bandwidth Manager address exactly this problem. By combining the flexibility of our charging (already in use today at TTSL, Idea, Aircel and Uninor) with the innovative user and service policies powered by our policy manager CSPs can create mobile broadband offers that are precisely tailored to each subscriber’s requirements and in line with the amount they are willing to pay.
For example, with the Telcordia solution, CSPs can offer users the ability to purchase access to specific services (such as music or videos) or specific sites (such as Facebook or YouTube) and to purchase the access only when they need it. This keeps costs down for users and maximizes efficient use of the network resources while managing the quality of service experienced by the subscribers. In addition, CSPs can offer promotions and discounts – for example a free video download if subscribers sign up to automatic renewal of a service or dynamic pricing, where the price the subscriber pays depends on how current load on the network.
These capabilities allow CSPs to tailor their offerings to each market segment: price sensitive subscribers can take advantage of offers and promotions to save money, while others can customize the services to work the way they want. This allows CSPs to charge users a fair price and for the users to receive a high quality service in return. It also means that CSPs can create new mobile broadband services offering entertainment, health, security and business-related services – increasing their revenues by enhancing the experience without requiring subscribers to increase their total monthly spend.
How do you compare 3G with WiMax? According to you, which technology (3G or WiMax) is best suited for the India market and why?
We recognize that there are many choices and that it is critical for CSPs to make the right decision for their company, subscribers and business model. Ultimately, they need to understand what technology path is the right one for them to deliver the experience that their subscribers are expecting and, ultimately, will demand.
Telcordia is network technology and network vendor neutral. Our solutions are designed to allow CSPs to get the most out of all their network investments: CDMA, GSM 2G, 3G, WiMAX, LTE, etc. 3G is here today, with networks already launched. It is the first step in providing mobile broadband services and will be the focus of considerable investment and innovation over the next year. 4G technologies such as WiMAX and LTE are also in the process of being launched and will enable additional new services. We see them as complementary: both will be important in India.
