NEW DELHI, INDIA: From being a dominant mobile operator, Bharti Airtel is now spreading its wings into other areas such as IPTV. This has also increased the IT requirements of the company. Amrita Gangotra, CIO (mobility), Bharti Airtel Limited tells R Jai Krishna of CyberMedia News about the focus area in IT for the mobile operator.

CMN: What will you as a CIO like to hear from vendors during the next fiscal?
Amrita: We will like to hear more on the IT implementation in the business side. The IT benefits and value to business areas are to be focused, as they will also have an impact on operations.
The most important will be workflow automation integrating all approval process. Customer management and application will also be our focus area. We will like to have an end-to-end view on major areas such as monitoring and managing SLA metrics.

CMN: If you were to name five top technologies that you would consider using, what will those be?
Amrita: The important aspect is about the required infrastructure management, as it worsens almost with the subscriber growth rate we are facing now. We want to use a lot of idle infrastructure and optimize it. We will like to focus on areas such as virtualization and power management in data centers.
The first element is the management system, and to get an end-to-end performance, as our businesses is highly spread. We want to effectively use the idle infrastructure though successful implementation is an issue.

CMN: If you were to name top five vendors on various IT areas, who will those be?
Amrita: We work with almost all the vendors and everything is done through IBM. As for the infrastructure we rely on Cisco; the call center is supported by Nortel. We also work with Verisign in the area of security. We also use a lot of Oracle applications such as ERP, CRM, and CRC.

CMN: What will be Bharti Airtel's major focus area in 2008?
Amrita: The future focus is to scale-up according to the number of subscriber growth, as there are billions of records coming in every day. This we will do with a robust architecture in place. Now, the challenge is in envisaging on how to scale-up. However, we end up doing things for the first-time.
Finally, there is a rapid growth of subscribers, and we need to keep up with the pace in a continuous manner in an industry where IT is the backbone.
Online transactions are changing the business platforms; there is also a challenge for delivery of various services in varied devices with Bharti Airtel getting into other spaces such as IPTV. There is a lot invested in research and development for technology as IT is the backbone for the telecom industry.
The challenges are also the aligning the business requirements with the IT systems implementation. It is necessary for CIOs to drive it in the right direction and ensure that it is implemented successfully. We may have the best of technology, but the focus has to be on implementation, which is a big challenge.