Intelligent solutions for Indian market

Andy Evripides, director - Sales and Marketing,Telesoft Technologies, who was recently in India to participate in the India Telecom 2008, talks to Sudhakaran of CyberMedia News about the company’s passive monitoring services and its business pans for the Indian market

Could you please give a brief idea about HINTON passive monitoring probes from Telesoft?

Telesoft Technologies designs, manufactures and sells telephony equipment for monitoring fixed and mobile telephony networks. The HINTON Locator is a passive monitoring probe that can be connected to any mobile network to give service providers the location-related signaling information that enables them to pinpoint subscribers’ location to within 100-500 meters.

The actual location-based applications are provided by SIs and OEMs, who access the information they require using our probe technology.

Typical applications include – directing mobile subscribers to the nearest cash machine or perhaps giving them the weather for a geographic area.

There are many commercial applications for such technology from navigational and location-based services to E911 type location tracking to assist emergency services in their tasks.

What is the market potential of the service?

The location-based services industry is set to grow from $110 million this year to $2.2 billion in 2013 according to ABI Research, as operators and service providers up their game and dramatically improve their service offerings in this area.

How does the mobile network monitoring technology work? How does it help the intelligence agencies and law enforcing authorities to track criminals?

Telesoft Technologies make passive network monitoring probes that can be connected to fixed and mobile networks and extracts signaling and media information. Passive means that it overlays the telephony network, extracting the data via optical or electrical splitters on the line between telephony equipment.

This has advantages of not affecting the normal working of the network and not overloading the processing power of the switches etc with an additional extraction workload.

The HINTON product range can extract signaling information such as call setup data (number being rung etc) as well as the media information (call content) such as voice, data or video.

It can be used for a number of purposes including fraud detection in telephony networks – finding spoof numbers that cannot be billed and network abuse such as illegal number redirects.

The signaling information in a mobile network contains location information such as cell ID and area information that allows location-based services.

Also mobile networks can be monitored to find roaming subscribers as they enter a network and send them a welcome note.

You also have a Telecom Expense Management System…

Yes. In conjunction with our partners who create the applications themselves we provide such services that allow billing verification, fraud management, customer experience management etc.

While the billing verification ensures subscribers are correctly invoiced according to their actual usage, fraud management detects and stops unauthorized use of the network. Customer experience management is aimed at optimizing the service levels according to customer types to reduce churn and optimize profitability.

How do you evaluate the potential of Indian market in the backdrop of the global economic scenario?

India is still expanding at 7-7.5 per cent today despite a slowdown (it was running at 9 per cent for the last four years). In the UK, Europe, USA and elsewhere growth is stagnant and indeed most foreign economies are now in recession.

In addition the telecom build out continues at huge pace here in India. See, ten million subscribers have joined the mobile networks in September only. To put this into perspective, this is more than the population of the whole of Sweden, the home country of Ericsson.

Whilst India has 315 million mobile subscribers in September this year, according to TRAI, iSuppli think it will reach 715 million by 2012.

The rollout of 3G services may even stretch this number higher but with a CAGR of 25 percent India is the place to be and that is the reason why Telesoft has opened a sales and support office in Delhi.

We realize that our future growth will come from countries like India. We believe that within 18 months our revenues from India will be greater than those from Europe.

What is your business plans for India?

To establish a sales and support infrastructure to ensure we capture our list of target customers and differentiate ourselves from the competition by delivering excellent customer support to the numerous Tier 1, Tier 2 customers in India; both directly and indirectly via our partner Soanar.

Our focus areas are IVR/Media Platforms, Monitoring Probes, Location Probes.

For IVR/Media Platforms, we already have an extensive installed base in India via our relationship with Telcordia with their pre-paid mobile automated top-up service. This runs right across India in 22 languages and allows customers to top-up their mobile phones.

We believe there are many other similar deals to be done here and that our technology, being both compact and powerful, is uniquely suited to this market area.

We see immense potential for Monitoring probes and Locations Probes as well.

Regarding Location Probes, with growth expected to take off in the location based services market, after several false dawns (ABI research say $111 million today growing to $2.2 billion in 2013) we feel this area is ripe for growth.

Given the infrastructure of software developers here in India we think India may even become a key world driver for this market exporting this technology to the rest of the world.