Expert View

March 20, 2004
Telco/broadband services segment will warm up

Geetanjali Wadhwa & Pradeep Chakraborty

HYDERABAD -- MagnaQuest, an IT solutions provider, delivers end-to-end, customer-centric, IT solutions. It offers a suite of solutions, with value-competitive service components tightly integrated into the solutions, or delivered on request. This approach ensures that its solutions provide seamless integration with the customer’s business processes. In India, it aims to focus on providing customer management and billing solutions to the data segment and the interactive services segment. Convergence plus meets with Rajiv Debbad, regional manager, India, EMEA to discuss the company plans, and its strategies for the Indian market. Excerpts from the interview:

Convergence Plus: How has the company performed in the last quarter?

Rajiv Debbad: MagnaQuest's performance during the last quarter has been exceptional. Some new deals concluded in the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Nigeria, and the Philippines led to our entry into virgin markets such as Eastern Europe and Africa.

CP: What are your strategies for the Indian market year this year?

RD: This year, we wish to focus on providing customer management and billing solutions to the data segment and the interactive services segment for the India market. We believe that the telco/broadband services segment will warm up to provide various value-added services (VAS) on their networks. They will also need sophisticated billing solutions that can bill for such add-on services, in a reliable and internationally benchmarked manner. We, therefore, are quite keen to look at this segment, and partner with them to showcase leading edge solutions that we are exposed to, from our international experience.

CP: What, according to you, are the current industry trends?

RD: The industry is fast moving towards the multi-service mode. Following the international example, we expect the Indian service providers to offer bundled VAS like VoD and PPV, and other telco-specific VAS, in a convergent manner, apart from video and data services. The attractiveness for the service providers stems from the fact that the ARPU growth from such services often outweighs the ARPU growth from basic plain vanilla services. It is here that billing solution vendors like MagnaQuest would have a role to play. We ensure that such services are launched quickly to exploit short windows of opportunities, and be ahead of the competition as well.

CP: Given that CAS has been more of a no-show, how do you intend to position the MQSubscribe?

RD: Our customers, who got affected by the CAS no-show, have already indicated their intent to offer VAS such as VoD to their discerning group of subscribers. We expect more opportunities for MQSubscribe sales to similar service providers over the medium term. We are seeing some opportunities from the DTH segment opening up as well. In addition, as indicated before, we are a billing solutions company for not only the cable-based pay-TV segment, but also the entire video/data/content service provider universe. That makes us useful to a larger audience, and not just the CAS-affected market.

CP: Are you focusing on broadband? What are your initiatives in this segment?

RD: Yes, internationally, MagnaQuest has customers who are in the broadband segment. This includes two large broadband satellite services providers in Hong Kong and the US. We also have several tie-ups with multiple network solutions partners who address this segment. We are looking to unveil few initiatives in this segment in this show in the VoD and IPTV space. This will be quite useful to the broadband service providers.

We also believe that our knowledge base and domain experience in the broadband field internationally is something that our industry colleagues in India will find of some use. This would be shared by one of my colleagues, A. Srinivas, program head, in the Billing & CRM conference track on March 20 at the same venue as the Convergence India show. This will mention case studies and our insights on how the industry will move on the customer acquisition and profitability front, as far as broadband service off take is concerned.

Contact:
MagnaQuest Solutions
www.magaquest.com