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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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 |
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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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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.
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 |
Sun Microsystems inked a deal with |
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