Aricent to Focus on 3G/4G Opportunities in the APAC Region

Aricent, a provider of communications technology and services, works closely with communications service providers (CSPs) and equipment manufactures to solve the emerging and complex innovation, SI and R&D challenges these organizations face in this highly competitive market. The company has co- developed some of the world’s first Femtocell, WiMAX and In-flight broad- band solutions. Asia Pacific Business & Technology Report recently got an opportunity to interact with Neeraj Vyas, vice president of Business Development to know more about the company’s activities in the Asia-Pacific region. - Ed.

Q: Briefly tell us about Aricent’s activities in the Asia-Pacific region.

A: Aricent is a global innovation technology and services company focused exclusively on innovation. We are a strategic supplier to the world’s leading application, infrastructure and service providers.

Asia Pacific is a very important region for us already and in FY11 we will have a strong focus on this to help our customers develop the next generation of communication services and technologies.

Our recent announcement of being the system integrator to provide Nepal Telecom with a convergent mediation and interconnect billing solutions is a great example of how we are helping our operator customers bring the next level of services and experience to their customers.

Q: What are the key markets for Aricent in the region? Who are your target customers?

A: Aricent is a strategic supplier to the world’s leading application, infrastructure and service providers with operations in 19 countries worldwide. Some of our key markets in the APA C region include India, China, Japan, Korea amongst others.

We will continue to offer cutting edge innovation coupled with our strong delivery and lifecycle services to our customers in the region. Unfortunately, our legal contracts with our customers prevent us from naming them but they range from device manufacturers to service providers.

India is an important market for us. Our recent announcement of providing Convergent Mediation and Convergent Interconnect Billing solutions to Nepal Telecom – Nepal’s largest and most prolific telecom operator demonstrates our ability to be the strategic SI partner with our customers. We do count some of the largest Indian operators as our customers and we will continue to provide them with our services to help them deliver great experiences to their customers.

Q: The worldwide communications industry is undergoing revolutionary changes. Are you able to keep pace with the technological innovations happening at your clients’ end?

A: I would say that in many ways we are helping power and co-create that change. The change that the communications industry is witnessing is disruptive. User experience is key and operators are realizing that the road to owning the customer loyalty and growing revenue is to provide a great experience to the consumers – this can span from the device UI to the network and all the way to the operations and billing systems (OSS /BSS ).

If you see, in the case of Nepal Telecom, the reason why they are upgrading their OSS /BSS is to be able to provide a better overall experience to their customers as well as reduce time-to-market of deploying new services. Our cutting edge solutions and unique SI capabilities were the prime reason for us winning that deal.

There are many more examples such as our Android CoE, Media EXP as well as, of course, our recently announced offering of Experience Engineering – all are geared towards co-creating, along with our customers, some of the most innovative products and services in the communications space.

Q: Tell us about a few technologies that show Aricent keeps up with this technology momentum.

A: Aricent recently launched Experience Engineering, the industry’s first integrated strategy, innovation, product development and systems integration engagement model aimed at enabling both fixed and mobile network operators to conceptualize, productize and commercialize highly differentiated subscriber experiences. Experience Engineering has been developed specifically to enable network operators to deliver the best possible user experience.

Aricent’s new Innovation Lab is designed to help operators assess, develop and deploy new business models and improve the overall customer experience. The new facility and associated services last year end which are aimed at helping service providers architect and implement the latest in multi-vendor Operational Support Systems (OSS ) and Business Support Systems (BSS ) technology. Based upon a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA ) approach, the lab highlights how service providers can evolve their existing OSS / BSS solutions as well as rapidly implement new OSS / BSS components in support of advanced services and 4G.

The biggest driving trend is significant focus on delivering a great user experience. More and more people are realizing that User Experience (UE) is not just about the User Interface (UI). Beyond the UI, the UE is heavily dependent on factors such as connectivity – as the available bandwidth directly affects the experience as well as what services can be provided on the device. Performance optimization is also key and with more moving parts today than ever before (display, power, processor, radio chips etc.), devices are complex and harmonizing -- and not just integrating -- components is more important than ever.

With platforms such as Android gaining momentum, we see a lot of people building Android based devices with a focus on providing a differentiated experience to consumers. This of course throws up a lot of opportunities for us with our Android CoE to provide a rich multimedia experience on the mobile devices.

Extending that, since more and more people want a rich multimedia experience on their mobile devices, there is a significant load on the current network infrastructure which was formed before the YouTube and iPhone era. Thus, we also see a move to higher speed networks such as 3G, LTE and WiMAX.

Q: Recently you also won an HR award. What motivated you to initiate a program like iRefer?

A: We won recognition for the “Best Employee Referral Program” across all industries at the Annual Global ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards.

The award was presented to Aricent for its iRefer program – a company- wide initiative that encourages employees to refer talented individuals to fill potential employment opportunities, thus fostering close-knit relationships among employees and resulting in tremendous synergy and team spirit.

Apart from this, our award winning employee referral program iRefer got its own micro-site on the company intranet – iRefer helped us hire 45 percent (of our) employees this year.

Last year, the economic conditions were difficult, but despite that, we grew by over 20 percent. This was primarily due to our ability to align ourselves closely with our customers and engage with them at a strategic level to help them innovate out of these difficult times. Internally, from HR’s perspective too, we followed the same principle; huge emphasis was given on communication where the organization and employees understood each others’ need and delivered accordingly.

“Employee Engagement” has been given top-most priority in the organization as we firmly believe that only engaged employees can create engaged customers. Further, despite the tough economic situation, where most of the companies shied away from doing employee engagement surveys, we went ahead and did our annual survey to hear from our employees on their thoughts and where they think we could do better.

Q: What are your views on the performance of the ICT sector in India during the past couple of years, especially during the economic crisis?

A: The Indian Telecommunications network with 430 million connections (as on March 2009) is the third largest in the world. The Telecom sector is growing at a speed of 46-50 percent during the recent years. This rapid growth is possible due to various proactive and positive decisions of the Government and contribution of both by the public and the private sectors. T he rapid strides in the telecom sector have been facilitated by liberal policies of the Government that provides easy market access for telecom equipment and a fair regulatory framework for offering telecom services to the Indian consumers at affordable prices. P resently, all the telecom services have been opened for private participation.

India’s software and services exports have been rising rapidly. The annual growth rate ranges between 20 -22 percent in IT services and nearly 55 percent in IT -enabled services (ITES ), such as call centres, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO ) and other administrative support operations. Together they are predicted to grow at 25 percent untill 2010.

The communications industry is experiencing unprecedented change. For consumers, user experience now trumps technology and price as the key driver of purchase and adoption of new products and services. Communications Service Providers (CSP s) are facing aggressive new competition from device makers and powerful Internet companies all looking to capitalize on the mobile Internet. And for equipment manufacturers, cost pressures and the need to invest in new technologies are driving the need for new ways to improve efficiency and scale, while achieving a significantly lower cost structure.

These market forces are creating a fundamental new set of innovation and system integration (SI ) challenges for CSP s. These include creating a subscriber device competitive with the iPhone, delivering rich converged services, connecting a wide range of new electronics such as digital picture frames and navigation devices, and building network API s and SDK s to best monetize cloud-based services.

Equipment makers now must strike a delicate research and development balance between investments in existing products and those required to ensure competitive readiness in new growth areas like metro Ethernet and Long Term Evolution (LTE ).

Aricent is the first company purposely constructed to work closely with CSP s and equipment manufactures to solve the emerging and complex innovation, SI and R&D challenges these organizations now face, in what some analysts estimate to be a $9 billion market. Aricent is a fundamentally new breed of strategic supplier architected to co-create, together with our customers, the world’s most innovative communications products and services.

Q: What are your immediate expansion plans in the APAC region?

The APAC region is an important area for us and there are many opportunities as the 3G/4G roll out grows and operators look to create valuable and differentiated services for their customers.

Our recent Nepal Telecom announcement is one such example where we were a strategic supplier and system integrator for the solution to Nepal Telecom. This is a three three year systems integration contract to provide Convergent Mediation and Convergent Interconnect Billing solution that enables a wide range of next generation communication services. Aricent will act as the primary systems integrator for convergent Mediation and Interconnect solutions. As a turnkey implementation provider offering supply, delivery, installation and commissioning, Aricent will integrate systems, which together enable next-generation product and service offerings for both pre-paid and post-paid customers. In support of the agreement, Aricent will be implementing and integrating its proven and broadly deployed Active Mediation System, in conjunction with Intec’s market-leading InterconnecT software. The engagement also includes post-deployment managed services in support of the converged solution. The broad compatibility of Aricent’s solution across different networks and systems will pioneer operational convergence within Nepal Telecom by enabling the operator to create a common, unified mediation platform and a single interconnect system for the entire network. The solution has the potential to reduce total cost of ownership and minimize revenue leakage.

Q: Any new technologies in the pipeline?

A: We will continue to make significant investments into nextgen technologies such as LTE , WiMA X as well as upcoming platforms like Android and rapidly growing areas such as MVAS , 4G and Cloud Computing.

4G or the fourth-generation wireless is expected to use available radio spectrum more efficiently, and as a result, provide end users with cablemodem transmission speeds which will support high-quality streaming video.

Our strategy is to continue to co-create the most innovative communications products, services and technologies. We continue to invest in areas such as Android, VAS , LTE WiMA X and more to further cement our position as the top global telecom R&D services provider in the world.