Competition in India’s telecom industry has substantially
increased, leading to a negative impact on voice ARPUs. This has a
significant effect on India’s telecom industry as almost 80
percent of the revenues are still generated from voice. Currently,
data revenues form only about 15 percent of the service
provider’s gross revenue. The key challenge for the operators
would be to increase this percentage of revenues from non voice
including data and other sources to increase the ARPUs.
In this competitive environment, Big Blue is eyeing an opportunity.
IBM is keen on utilizing its industry experience to help telecom
operators drive more revenues using VAS. IBM will help telecom
operators in identifying appropriate VAS content to develop and
launch in the market, followed by commerce around the content to
monetize the same and finally ensure collaboration and capabilities
required to launch this content in the market.
IBM suggests that telcos must create a common infrastructure and
management layer (like the service delivery platform) that is
integrated with the telco OSS/BSS layer where various third party
content, application and software makers can offer their services
to create a true "digital marketplace". Many telcos have already
initiated a move in this direction with Digital Media Exchange
(DMX).
IBM is also advocating telcos to come together and form an industry
wide cloud platform for VAS – which can be used as a base
infrastructure for them to launch various, differentiated VAS
offerings. IBM believes that there is little business case for each
one of them to put fresh investments on a stand-alone basis. For
instance, a shared services approach for things like know your
customer (KYC) and fraud management can be extremely useful for
telecom operators. If telcos already have a private cloud, then IBM
would examine as to which part of that cloud can be re-used.
Akash Saxena, Vice President - Offerings management &
development, GTS, IBM said, “Cloud is important for all the
industries. Today companies want a complete consolidated,
virtualized and automated solution. IBM can help companies develop
the entire cloud environment - from concept planning to hardware
and software selection and implementation.” For example, IBM
in December 2009 built a cloud computing environment for SK
Telecom, the largest telecommunications company in Korea with over
24 million customers. The IBM-built cloud environment allowed SK
Telecom and its business partners to develop, test and publish new
end-user services.
In India, the company already has a strong presence in
telecommunications sector with clients including Bharti Airtel and
Idea Cellular. For instance it manages Bharti's IT infrastructure
in India.
About Author
Vinita Gupta is Principal Correspondent at InformationWeek India. Vinita has over six years experience in IT reporting and has interviewed more than 500 business executives. She has a PG Diploma in Business Management from NMIMS and Post Graduate Degree in Communication and Journalism from Mumbai University
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