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Telecom: IT Never Stopped Ringing

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CIOL Bureau
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For the telecom

sector FY 2004-05 was the year of consolidation, following a frenzy of

activities the previous fiscal. Since 2003-04 saw all telecom service providers

deploying a plethora of IT solutions to support the growing amount of

subscribers and launching of new value-added services, this year it was natural

that the speed slowed down as all telcos focused on RoIs. As any sort of IT

deployments in a service provider environment are usually such large-scale

affairs that even a comparatively tranquil year saw 53% growth in IT

consumption by the telecom sector-at Rs 6,665 crore it accounted for 15% of the

total domestic IT consumption maintaining its second place behind BFSI.

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hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0 v:shapes="_x0000_s1026"> style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Though heavy-duty IT

implementation was a fairly common event amongst service providers, the telecom

sector still remained under the shadows of the momentous Bharti IT

infrastructure outsourcing deal inked with IBM towards the fag end of 2003-04.

In March 2004, Bharti signed a 10-year $750 mn contract with IBM. Under the deal

IBM would maintain its hardware, software and IT services, including billing,

CRM, data warehousing, e-mail and intranet services. IBM has also consolidated

Bharti's datacenters and IT helpdesks and enhanced its disaster recovery

capabilities.

Outside of

outsourcing, storage was perhaps the most sought after domain for the telecom

industry during the year. As most leading storage vendors would agree, that

while large scale deployment amongst SMBs gave them visibility and volumes, the

margins were brought by typical large multi-SAN implementations by the service

providers. Even as others in India Inc hesitated on costly SAN deployments or

thought about alternatives like NAS or IP-SAN, the sheer scale of data, owing

to a large subscriber base, necessitated the SAN deluge amongst service

providers.

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Where IT

Happened 

  • style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Large

    multi-SAN implementation was common amongst service providers as

    storage found its biggest taker in the telecom sector style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>
  • style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Integration

    of OSS/BSS applications with ERP and billing solutions as well as

    large scale deployment of CRM with BI was common style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>
  • style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>IT

    and network infrastructure outsourcing received the Bharti boost but

    did not spread amongst other service providers style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>
  • style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Many

    service providers like Reliance and Tatas looked at third-party

    data-centers as a lucrative source of revenue style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>

Even as telcos

continued to grow in size, deployment of new enterprise applications or

replacement of existing ones was a recurrent phenomenon. Integration of OSS/BSS

applications with ERP, CRM, BI, data warehousing or even billing applications

was a common trend noticed across the industry. Idea was one typical example:

its AP circle was on SAP while the recent acquisition Escotel was on Ramco Marshall;

during the year both migrated to Oracle. In fact, SAP, which was the undisputed

numero uno in ERP and CRM related enterprise apps thoughout the year faced its

first roadblock in the telecom sector, where Oracle found a few significant

takers including the likes of Bharti. It seems that Oracle's RDBMS expertise

carried the day as most service providers required large databases to support

their voluminous data. Infrastructure management applications were also not

left behind.

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  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>

Talking about

telecom service providers, it is quite natural that networking infrastructure

cannot be far behind. Again, Idea was a good example: its ambitious Project

Galaxy, aimed at connecting all its different hubs and circles into one

network, required tremendous investment in network infrastructure investments

and subsequent setting up of complex processes. Idea's smooth and successful

rollout of EDGE was only possible owing to this network being in place.

In an

initiative to bolster its support to mobile customers, the CRM wing of Hutch, 3

Global Services, deployed a heterogeneous network, comprising routing and LAN

switching solutions for their support centers in India. The networking

equipment used included Cisco 7200 Series routers, Cisco Catalyst series of LAN

switches, besides PIX firewalls and Cisco IP phones. On the networking side,

videoconferencing was another services that caught the eyes of telcos this

year. While Reliance offered videoconferencing services across its webworlds,

BSNL entered the fray towards the end of the year. MTNL had also started the

service in Mumbai and Delhi.

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Networking was

also crucial to support the increasing broadband rollout in the country during

the year. Cisco helped VSNL deploy one of India's largest broadband Metro

Ethernet solutions for Tata Indicom broadband services. It provided Tata

Indicom's enterprise and residential customers with broadband services of

10/100 Mbps connectivity, with a capability of connecting over a million

customers. The deployment will enable VSNL to deliver bundled services like

voice over IP, broadcast TV, video-on-demand for residential customers and IP

VPN, videoconferencing services for enterprise customers. The deployment was in

line with VSNL's endeavor to provide 'triple-play' (Voice-Data-Video) Tata

Indicom broadband services across eight cities in the country, in the first

phase.

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Telecom's Other

IT High Points of FY 2004-05

Sun Microsystems inked a deal with

Tata Teleservices for the deployment of Sun Fire 15k enterprise class

high-end servers. This was touted as one of the largest for servers in the

telecom space. The contract involved deployment of Sun Fire 15k enterprise

class high-end servers supporting mission critical applications like

billing, CRM, ERP, order management and data warehousing.



Bharti set up an IP-based virtualized call center infrastructure across all
locations using ACD and speech recognition and a Service Delivery Platform

for content and application to be delivered to end-customers over mobile,

fixed line and broadband.

Another area

where IT usage was on the upswing was the maintenance of datacenters by almost

every large service provider. Not only did these datacenters support the

value-added services to retain customers, they also acted as third-party

hosting services for large enterprise customers. In fact, the impressive

Reliance datacenters at Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City or the VSNL ones at

Vashi hosted large enterprises like BSE, Mahindra, ESPN, TCS and JP Morgan

amongst others.

Just like many

other industries, going open source way was another visible trend. Bharti

successfully deployed Linux on multiple critical applications, under a massive

Rs 8 crore IT initiative, managing to breakeven in a record span of six months

flat.

Source:Dataquest

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