Zia Askari
HYDERABAD: Close on the heels after changing its name from iSphinx softnet to
Softential Technologies, the US based company with its back-office and
development operations based at Hyderabad has bagged a $1.65 million contract to
build a network operations center for CenturyTel. US based CenturyTel, a
communications company, is engaged primarily in providing local exchange
telephone services and wireless telephone communication services.
"We at Softential are going to manage and report on the entire voice and
data infrastructure. The voice network that we are going to manage includes more
than 1000 switches from Nortel, Cisco, Lucent and Alcatel. This is a major
breakthrough as far as our operations are concerned," said, Samuel S G,
General Manager, Softential Technologies at its Hyderabad center.
In its bid to make in-roads within the country, the company is looking
forward to pitch its enterprise network management product suite - Netcool
within the Indian market. "We are all set to introduce the product in the
sub-continent and initially we are targeting the defense, BSNL and VSNL as our
potential buyers for the product in India," he added.
The product is designed to provide 24/7 support to its customers opening a
window into vital network functions, with real time management tools that
control over the infrastructure and constitute the overall system performance of
mission critical operations. The product allows to analyze current systems and
also to predict future performance and service capacity. It develops a
co-relation between a number of networks and helps in firewall monitoring as
well.
"Initially we are pricing the product at around Rs 60 lakh and hope to
get in entrenched within the country's major players like the defense. The
monitoring is so simple that you don't need to have a workforce for this, even a
single man with suitable knowledge of networks can handle the management of the
whole enterprise networking. We are also eyeing at the Indian Railways as they
also need a product like this to keep them abreast of what is happening at their
network," Samuel explained.