Q&A Nikhil Jain

Elitecore Technologies, a provider of Telecom Software (OSS/BSS) solutions recently announced 10 successful wins for WiMAX 16e & 16d in SEA, APAC & Eastern European regions. The company has experience in serving Tier1-Tier 3 service providers in deployment of the WiMAX 16e &16d CSN platform.

Nikhil Jain, COO, Elitecore Technologies, spoke to Asia Pacific Business and Technology Report about the company’s strategies and future plans in the region.

What are the diversification plans of Elitecore Technologies?

The major plans would be in the Telecom & Security segment and the key strategy will be Inorganic growth through mergers & acquisitions. We are very aggressive¬ly positioning ourselves in the SEA, APACand African markets. We already have experience deploying NGN so¬lutions to the leading operators in these regions, and we will continue to focus in these markets.

What were your main strategies to main¬tain leadership during an economic slow¬down?

During the slowdown we invested heavily on our R&D and market research activities, which helped us in developing our product portfolio as per the changing market needs.

During the recession in some European markets, have you shifted your focus to new geographies?

We have a very limited exposure to the European market. Our major focus areas in terms of geography have always been the Middle East, APAC, SEAand Af¬rica. Our focus since the beginning has always been to enhance our presence in the data segment in developing market. So we have not lost our focus and have contin¬ued to do so during the slowdown, which has helped us in getting significant business volumes -- even during the slowdown.

Q:What are your investment plans in In¬dia?

We are planning to invest close to 145-150 cr in the next 2 years. In terms of our investments, the major fo¬cus will be on enhancing our presence through mergers and acquisitions. We are also planning to invest heavily in the VASand unified communications segment. The unified communications solution not only offers reduc¬tion in travel time, but also better sales closure and, sub¬sequently, increased revenue generation.

Even though it is not a new technology, since unified communications has been around for a couple of years, the integrated unified platform is emerging as the need of the hour. The fact that the individual components of unified communications are already witnessing healthy double digit growth numbers is encour¬aging too. For in-stance, emailing and IPtelephony is grow¬ing at 20 percentage and 30 percentage CAGRrespectively. Even though the market adoption of unified commu¬nications has been slow so far, accord¬ing to IDC, the UCmarket is expected to expand annually at a rate of 25 percentage to reach $1.32 billion by 2011. The arrival of unified communica-tions signals the beginning of the convergence of VoIPtelephony, e-mail, instant messaging, mobile commu-nications, and audio and video Web-conferencing into a single platform that shares a common directory and common developer tools. The other pieces of the unified communications portfolio include the conferencing and collaboration tools and unified messaging tools.

Q:Following the BWA spectrum auction, what are your strategies to focus on WiMAX segment?

Post BWA-spectrum auction, we have shifted our fo¬cus on the WiMAXmarket in India. We have recently announced 10 successful deployment of WiMAX16e & 16d CSN platform in the last 18 months that shows our seriousness in this segment. We are among the leading vendors globally, having experience deploying WiMAXsolutions for leading operators. We have a very strong presence in this segment with range of products from AAA, Rating & Charging and Policy Management which gives us a very unique position in the OSS/BSSsegment. Also we have Pre Integrated WiMAXSolutions in our kitty which enables us to reduce the TCOand time to market for the operators. The key USPof Elitecore are:

Single Vendor for Billing, Revenue Management & Subscriber Management - In a highly competitive market Elitecore offers an advantage to telecom opera¬tors by offering Complete Charging, BSS, Policy Manage¬ment & AAAsolution under one umbrella thereby re¬ducing integration time and costost for providers a key USPof Elitecore

Multi Vendor Agnostic Elitecore product suite of¬fers open, expandable APIs and multi tier architec¬ture making it easy to integrate with multiple ven¬dors -- billing and customer care platforms, a back office layer, network elements, VASproviders in the operators ecosystem, Elitecore is also pursuing actively IOTwith all leading vendor in the ecosystem to offer a complete solution to the operator.

Access Network Agnostic -- Elitecore’s CRESTEL& Elite AAAplatform accommodates multiple technolo¬gies like 2G, 2.5G, 3Gand WIMAXsimultaneously, over its convergent framework, supporting rapid geographi¬cal rollouts and enabling service providers to deliver a simple, converged solution to customers with a unified view, irrespective of the type and number of services

Ability to offer modular and end to end solution -- Elitecore product suite is an integrated application, which can be deployed as an end to end solution or as individual modules. Once installed the operators can expand the modules, licenses and products as the ser¬vice provider business requirements. Operator does not have to buy the complete billing they can buy individual modules, thereby reduce cost for the operators unlike other big billing vendors who offer the complete billing and not modules.

Single team to address Consulting, Development & Implementation -- Unlike other vendors in the OSSBSSspace, Elitecore offers end to end support from a single team to address consulting, development and im¬plementation thereby reducing time to market and the time required to integrate with different teams.

Price benefit -- Elitecore offers a cost advantage vis a vis competition, as we have all product developed in India.

Flexibility in delivery -- Elitecore offers flexibility in delivery and implementation by offering order and management services post sales or offering Managed services (software as a service) and professional services at far more competitive rates than competition. Being based in India we understand the complexity at the operators ends and offers solution customized to their business requirement.

Convergent platform for IP based services -- Elitecore NGN OSSBSSis future ready to launch upcom¬ing next generation services like IPTV, VoIPand data services on same platform. The solution is robust and scalable meets the current market requirement of TPS.

Solution compliant to standards -- Elitecore so¬lutions are designed in compliance to industry stan¬dards such as Etom, WiMAXForum NWGStandards & 3GPP/3GPP2 standards. Elitecore solutions is also com¬pliant to ATCAarchitecture. This brings flexibility to service providers in reducing integration challenges and dramatically speed time-to-market and associated devel¬opment costs.

Do the forthcoming investments in 3G bring business to you?

In the 3Genvironment, operators are more focused on delivering services in more attractive packages over a convergent platform. Policy based control on the ser¬vices will be the key priority of the operators, so as to enhance the user experience by ensuring QoS. Services like BoD, VoD require dynamic policy control so as to ensure that proper rating and charging happens for such services.

Thus the major requirement of Operators post 3Gde¬ployment will be for AAA, rating charging, and central¬ized policy management.

Major challenges would be:

Service velocity: The ability to quickly deploy any service to any customer over any network over whatever device or interface he or she is using at that exact mo¬ment

Automated service fulfillment: This includes user self-service, which slashes both capex and opex. Aze¬ro-touch, flow-through environment with almost no human intervention fulfills users’ need for speed and virtually eliminates day-to-day human error from the revenue chain.

Competitive differentiation: In the coming age of IPubiquity, soon virtually every competitor will be reaping the cost and flexibility advantages of a core IPnetwork. But you can stand out by provisioning users and services rapidly and accurately, and giving them a greater hand in controlling their own services and features.

Yes the investments in 3Ghave brought business to us. We are working very closely with leading operators for deploying solutions for NGN services. We already have experience of deploying 3G/WiMAXsolutions for leading operators across SEAand APACwhich position as a leading player in this segment.

What are your strategies to retain top talent?

The first thing is our corporate culture, which im¬bibes our company’s vision. We, being an equal oppor¬tunity employer, have open door policies, and collabora¬tive leadership helps us in raising employee satisfaction. Second, being the customer and market driven approach for product positioning, transparency in operations and being performance driven organization helps us in at¬tracting and retain top talent.

What are some new innovative products in the pipeline?

The innovative product offerings would be in VAS, con¬tent charging, customer personalization -- which means giving the customer the ability to control their service experience. It means enabling customers to select and change the services and options they buy, allowing them to tailor their service experience to their own unique in¬terests at any time. Such personalization creates a com¬pelling buying experience for consumers because they are in complete control of their own experience and it creates freedom of choice by removing common barriers that currently create a less than satisfactory customer experience. IPTV networks, which send information over secure, managed, high capacity networks, empow¬er IPTV service provides to deliver the personalization that customers desire. Also, we are working very aggres¬sively on the Unified Communications solutions, which is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, telephony (including IPtelephony), video conferencing, call control and speech recogni¬tion, with non-real-time communica¬tion services such as unified mes¬saging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMSand fax). This allows an indi¬vidual to send a message on one medium and receive on another. It should be possible to easily transfer any activity or message to another medium. For example, one can receive a voicemail message and choose to access it through e-mail or a cell phone. If the sender is on¬line, according to the presence in¬formation and is currently accepts calls, the response can be sent im¬mediately through text chat or vid¬eo call. Otherwise, it may be sent as a non real-time message that can be accessed through a variety of media.

In this segment we are working on a IPCentrex solution, which re¬fers to a number of IPtelephony so¬lutions where Centrex service is of¬fered to a customer who transmits its voice calls to the network as packetized streams across a broad¬band access facility. IPCentrex builds on the traditional benefits of Centrex by combining them with the benefits of IPtelephony. One of these IPtelephony benefits is in¬creased utilization of access capaci¬ty. In IPCentrex, a single broadband access facility is used to carry the packetized voice streams for many simultaneous calls. When calls are not active, more bandwidth is avail¬able for high speed data sessions over the LAN, like Internet access. This is a much more efficient use of capacity than traditional Centrex.

What is the focus of your R&D initiatives?

We are very much focused on the telecom and OSS/BSSsegment and our R&D initiatives are directed on the same lines. In the coming future, we see a huge opportunity in the data segment and VAS, so we will try to align our R&D activities in these directions so as to keep our product in line with the market re¬quirement.

What are your focus areas in APAC?

Indonesia and Philippines are the key focus areas for us in the APACregion as these markets have huge potential. We already have worked very closely with the Tier 1 operators in these regions and are expecting significant business from this region in the coming future.