-Ajay Vaishnavi, COO, Cellnext

How do you think value-added services are going to fare in India and what services will gain prominence?
VAS in India will follow a global trend. Although right now it just forms around 14% of the operator's revenue but it is bound to grow two-three times than that. Currently, the operators are busy in collecting the numbers and once they are through, the focus will entirely turn to VAS. Growth of value added services in India is bound to be phenomenal. Presently, the major driver is person-to-person (P2P) messaging but overall, the ratio of P2P as a percentage of VAS is coming down gradually. Mobile entertainment is picking up in a big way along with the efficiency services. The third aspect is location based services and m-commerce although they have not picked up in India yet but are bound to become big in future.

What are the issues and challenges that players in the VAS market have to face?
The VAS industry is still very small and we still don't have a proper process or common benchmark. The revenue share is a major issue, although it has matured but it is very less as compared to the global standards. The reason is that the operators charge low revenue from the end user leading to lower revenue share for us. Moreover, there is so much of competition in the developers industry and this is driving down the revenue share. There is no common effort to make the industry grow but as the market becomes mature there will be more transparency. Another challenge at the customer level is to educate the customer that there are things beyond entertainment. It is a challenge to show the customer value beyond mobile entertainment.

Which of the sales modules are most popular for selling value added services? And which delivery channels will pick up?
The most popular is through the operator portal because the end user accesses that only. But for the enterprises services, we have various channels, and operator is just a partner. On the other hand, to sell value added services to the end user, there is no alternative, other than the operator portal, so the operator has a fair control. Today, the most popular delivery channel is SMS, but WAP and GPRS are also going to pick up. SMS has its limitation in just 160 characters and is cumbersome whereas if you use GPRS, it's a complete online experience and can be made user friendly, once people have compatible handsets and operators provide GPRS connection free, it can pick up. MMS is an area, which has not been explored properly, and it could be a profitable channel if used properly. In India for the rural areas, voice can be a successful delivery model

How will 3G affect the VAS market in India?
3G will enhance the application. It will help us create more applications and help us add more features to the existing application, making the experience much richer. But there are a number of challenges that we have to go through before 3G becomes a reality in India and value added services can leverage on it.

Sonia Sharma