India Telecom

January 29, 2004
Asia Netcom eyes Indian BPO segment

Geetanjali Wadhwa & Pradeep Chakraborty

NEW DELHI -- Asia Netcom has its genesis in Asia Global Crossing (AGC). Since restructuring, it has started pursuing the enterprise market aggressively. According to Rohit Arora, country general manager, Indian subcontinent, Asia Netcom India Pvt. Ltd., its mission is to halt the traffic within and around the Asia Pacific.

Earlier, it was operating as a carriers carrier. Now, Asia Netcom has decided to go after enterprise market. However, the carriers' carrier segment remains a key business area. Arora added its strength lies in being the only telecom carrier offering an entire suite of Layer 1, 2 and 3 services. It is eyeing the booming business process outsourcing (BPO) segment in India.

Asia Netcom is offering IP transit, MPLS VPNs, ATM, Frame Relay and private line services. Arora said: "These are our core strengths. We are experiencing the largest traffic in IP. Lot of Asia Pacific carriers ride on our facilities." Asia Netcom forayed into India to complete its Asia Pacific story. Arora said: "Since India is an IP driven country, most of the data traffic rides on IP. The BPO market is also booming. Hence, we are focusing on two services -- IP line or private line services and IP VPN services. The first one is generating a good amount of synergy to drive bandwidth in India."

As for private line services, since the market is bilateral in nature, most of the traffic is US bound. Asia Netcom's alliance with Indian operators is an all-destination pact. "We can take their customers to all destinations once they hit our network," added Arora. The carrier's end-to-end network (EAC) is from its AGC days. It has a ring structure and self-healing capability. "Most BPO and software services are mission-critical in nature. These factors are of great importance to customers as it provides a robust network, between say, Singapore and Los Angeles."

Arora said Asia Netcom would also be providing other value-added services (VAS), such as an offering of India-out cable services (such as SEA-ME-WE and APC) for providing private line services. "This combo has never been used before. Diversity is a huge play in India. We are talking with several BPO operators to bring business into India. We are bringing a unique combo of cable and private line services." Asia Netcom owns two-thirds of the route to India-US, which is self-healing in nature. This allows faster reaction time and better management control. "Since this has a ring architecture, it can swing and recreate circuits in a matter of milliseconds. As we don't have a cable extending to India, this will change it."

Addressing BPOs needs
Commenting on the concerns of BPOs, Arora said that if an MNC is outsourcing to India, and comes to learn that all of cables coming into India are linear threads and there is no auto restorable feature, it sets an alarm going. Next, most of the BPOs are engineering their redundancies. For example, if there is a cut, they have to fall back on another cable. It works with their costs, as these BPOs are sitting with 1.6-1.7 times the capacity they need.

"Such redundancies are best offered by service providers. If a self-healing cable is introduced in India, the individual excess capacities with the BPOs will be released. If the EAC is introduced, it will address the lack of supply, infrastructure and capacity, and the individual BPOs will not have to spend six or seven times of the actual costs," noted Arora.

IP VPN services are among Asia Netcom's strongest, well-differentiated products. He said: "We offer five classes of services -- these are the only services that offer a rich feature set and allows you to take one service depending on your applications and requirements. The operators can map the entire spectrum of applications across these five classes of services. Lots of features are unique -- user-based services are tailored as per the Indian needs, as the market is still immature. This allows us lot of innovation."

According to a Gartner survey of November 2003 for IP and IP VPN services, Asia Netcom is ranked first for offering these services. "We combine rich features with the various services, and offer the best services across the length and the breadth of the country," added Arora. It is charging as per "what-you-use" instead of flat rates.

Commenting on the MPLS VPN service for BPOs, Arora said that BPO units in India currently have a private line for each client. It is similar to having four or five disparate services. These are collocated to make it work end-to-end. This makes it cumbersome. Ramping up and down is a huge issue. Besides, the applications are of a seasonal nature.

Asia Netcom's MPLS VPN platform supports any-to-any platform, which is a huge benefit. "You can share the same infrastructure across different clients and impacts the cost equation. Ramping up and down is easy, and this provides easy entry and exit points as well. As the traffic is seasonal, it allows taking on short-term projects as well. We want to work with the BPO industry on the MPLS platform. We are talking to them," noted Arora.

Though the reaction of the industry has been very positive, certain integration issue remains. One is, migrating from a TDM to an IP VPN environment. "People want to pilot it out first as it would mean changing their inventory equipment, as well as those of their clients. Transition takes time. We are in discussions with BPOs to pilot it in a real-time, controlled environment."

Another issue is that changes are required during the transition, depending on the BPO's current state. "If on TDM, it means huge changes, especially a lot of their edge equipment. We are looking for technology to bridge and provide a platform to merge the existing technology with MPLS to have minimal changes. ATOM (Any Transport over MPLS) can provide that bridge."

Asia Netcom recently tied up with VSNL for private line services. On his India strategy, Arora said: "IPL can be employed in different ways. We have similar agreement with Reliance. Lots of cables are coming to India. Each operator has access to one cable. Since these are linear threads, the operators want to put capacity on more threads, besides keeping the costs in mind.

"We see ourselves as a key player in the backend. We are working with our partners for private line and IP VPN services. There are multiple ways to access our infrastructure through our partners. We will also provide the regional partner the ability to access our infrastructure. There are two to three ways to touch our customers -- via our country teams, our partners, and our accounts teams."