HP to add three more OpenCall partners in India

Pragati Simlote

NEW DELHI: HP India plans to add three more independent software vendors (ISVs) to its HP OpenCall partner base by this year-end. It currently has around five ISV partners in India including companies like Megasoft, Mahindra British Telecom, and Center for the Development of Telematics (C-DOT).

HP OpenCall is a suite of comprehensive, carrier-grade platforms for developing and deploying next-generation voice, data and converged services.

HP India Sales Pvt. Ltd software global business unit country sales manager Amit Chatterjee said, “With the five current partners, HP is in the project mode and they are already yielding revenues for us. Around 10-15 more companies have shown interest in OpenCall. We want to build our partner base slowly and would like to add another four- five partners by 2006. The Indian ISVs are bringing a lot of value on the business side and the new set of partners that we have signed would provide a variety of services.”

The company is developing its own ISV program and in APAC region it currently has around 50 partners. The company has also set up its third largest lab in Bangalore for this platform this month. The company is holding ISV event in three Indian cities dedicated towards the developers, potential partners where it talks about the platform, about the type of services that can be created on this platform, etc.

Responding to a question on the adoption of OpenCall in India, Chatterjee said, “Our OpenCall business in India has been growing exponentially for the last three years. In India, the telecom sector is on the path of increasing its infrastructure. As scale grows, the competitiveness among the operators also rises, the churn also grows and operators think of different ways to arrest that. Operators are coming out with various services to make things sticky, so we are seeing a lot of demand from the operators for this platform.”

Giving his take on the adoption of 3G by the operators, he said, “In the next one year time frame, we would see soft launch of 3G services by one or two operators that we are aware of and we are talking to them. They are very forward looking so they are looking at IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based services, video services, etc. The operators are currently evaluating technologies and are making investment,” he added.