Spicing IT Up

With his golf cap, and a vibrant attitude he looks a decade

younger. At heart, he is younger still-partying, gymming, doing 30 m underwater.

Navin Kaul, COO of Spice Telecom, Karnataka, is in a sense, the father of mobile

telephony in India. He was responsible for connecting the first mobile call in

the country-between former chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, and the

then Communications minister Sukhram-on July 31, 1995.

Associated with this industry since that year, he is an

ardent believer in the power of IT, which he says simplifies environments and

manages his critical operations. Telecom is a highly transactional industry

where thousands of records get generated on a daily basis. Whether one talks

about generating bills for customers and managing them, managing financials, or

managing the distribution channel, technology plays a very important role in all

aspects of the business. Telecom is also an industry, which budgets for PCs for

every employee, even before they are taken on board.

Kaul's

expectations from IT are, therefore, uncomplicated. First, he expects his

systems to effect error-free billing. Then in the customer servicing part, he

would want IT to generate all transactional data of a customer when he calls in

with a problem. “I have high expectations of IT internally to manage the

business too. For instance, I need the sales figures, revenues generated or lost

on a particular day on SMS. It is technology that can enable that,” he says. His

expectations from his IT team are similar. He would want the systems to work

24/7. The critical thing in this sector is to create a disaster recovery center,

which Spice has come up with in Mangalore. “You wouldn't want any interruptions

on the IT front, because if IT goes down, the whole company comes to a

standstill-not from the customer perspective because he can still make and

receive calls-but I will not be able to generate bills, manage the customer

well,” Kaul says.

There are goof-ups that keep on happening. But, if there is

a disaster recovery center one can fall back on, at least for a four-hour old

data to be imported back to the systems one can run the business efficiently.

The IT team in his organization has the critical role of deciding about the

spend, the kind of equipment to be bought, and the size of the equipment. “I

look at how the buy is going to help the overall business or how it is going to

make our people's life easier. Once that is determined, we go ahead with the

decision,” he says.

And no vendor, so far, has been able to push boxes at Spice

or take him for a ride-that is possible, he contends, only if you have a strong

IT department with the right people who can evaluate technology.

Inside Out

Career Path Started his career in 1978. Began with the pharmaceutical industry and then moved into the office automation industry. Also, had a three-year sting with software when he headed a Samsung JV software development company in Delhi. Associated with the telecom industry since 1995. Previous assignment was that of head of Spice Telecom in Punjab. Belongs To: Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. Education: Did management from Jammu University. When Not In Office: Parties and plays golf. Leads a very active lifestyte, involved in sports in a big way.

His enterprise has an IT head with 25 people working with

him. There is one section just to look after internal infrastructure, one to

look after billing systems, and yet another to look after business support

systems.

As the basic systems are all in place and for Spice now, it

is a question of upgrading them, expanding the storage capacity and looking at

the disaster recovery system-something that makes them spend around Rs 4 to 5

crore a year currently. That is a money well spend, says Kaul. Unlike many CXOs,

he has no hassles investing more and more on the right technology since it's so

key a component. “It's not that everything goes waste. There are new

technologies that keep on coming and you would like to keep yourself updated

through these technologies. The investment in IT grows larger, the moment you

start growing your business. For example, the storage needs to be increased as

the transactions start increasing. So you need to invest in hardware. Frankly,

nothing worries me about investing in IT. It makes your life much more easier,”

he says.

Investments will have a direct co-relation to productivity

gains, particularly for a company that is looking at aggressive growth in the

coming two years. “We have applied for six more licenses in North India and have

also applied for National Long Distance and International Distance licenses,” he

informs. As of now, Spice has a presence in Karnataka and Punjab. In the latter,

it is number two today among all the operators. It was the first to come to

Karnataka about nine years ago. 

Goutam Das





goutamd@cybermedia.co.in