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.com VOL 23 ISSUE 10 October 2016

VOICE&DATA

$4 BN VNO OPPORTUNITY OCTOBER 2016

`75Telecom Industry debates broadband as a utility I 74

The Business of Communications

76 pages including cover Special subscription offer on Page 62

App Alert Pg 47

$4 bn VNO Opportunity

What’s up with LTE?‘Organizations now recognize the importance of big data and Chief Data Officer’—Amit Sanyal Business Head, Consumer Value Solutions, Mahindra Comviva

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‘Ruckus Acquisition Strengthens Brocade’s Strategic Presence’—Andrew Coward VP, Service Provider Strategy, Brocade

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‘The Mobile Browser has become a Gateway to the Internet’—Robert Bu General Manager, UCWeb India

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Telecom Act II takes-off in India VNO Forum plays catalyst

Interview

n Airtel the fastest, Jio most consistent n Indepth view of ‘4 Years of 4G Devices’

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‘Organizations now recognize the importance of big data and Chief Data Officer’

Big data is enabling organizations to gain insights into their businesses letting them to harness all aspects of their business. Voice&Data quizzed Amit Sanyal, Business Head, Consumer Value Solutions at Mahindra Comviva to understand how big data is changing the way businesses work.

—Amit SanyalBusiness Head, Consumer Value Solutions, Mahindra Comviva

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Voice&Data: How can CIOs justify their investments on big data/analytics?Amit Sanyal: Most IT investments are undertaken with one of the two objec-tives in mind – reduce costs, increase revenues. Big data analytics kills several birds with one stone. In terms of costs, predictive modelling helps organizations to understand the various consequences of their actions and avoid costly mistakes. On the revenue front, big data analytics not only gives a competitive advantage to businesses but also helps in augmenting speed and accuracy of actions helping businesses to drive profitability. Consider-ing the various advantages given above, CIOs must push big data as a scientifi-cally proven and forward looking decision making approach to their internal as well as external stakeholders.

Voice&Data: How easy or difficult is to get insights from data using modern big data/analytics tools? Do organizations need to dedicate in-house specialists to do this? Amit Sanyal: In future businesses will run at zero latency and zero downtime. This will require a robust architecture as well as infrastructure to collect as well as ana-lyze huge amounts of real time data. This is where Big Data proves its usefulness as it uses machine learning algorithm to recognize patterns in data and thus helps in providing business clarity. Big data refines organization approach from one that is based on “hit and trial” to one that is based on a “well- defined” action-able plan. Organizations have intuitively realized the importance of big data and the role of the Chief Data Officer is only going to grow in importance in the future.

Voice&Data: In what ways has big data/analytics begun to transform telecom operators globally with whom Mahindra Comviva is closely linked?Amit Sanyal: The significant cost of customer acquisition and slim margins

Voice&Data: In what ways does big data rid organizations from stagnancy and growth challenges? Amit Sanyal: In today’s competitive landscape, the challenge before organi-zations is to increase the pace of innova-tions without letting costs to get out of control. Big data helps organizations to unlock various business competencies and avoid stagnancy and growth chal-lenges. By evaluating and analyzing data closer to its point of origin businesses can take timely action and unlock new revenue opportunities. For big data evangelists, what’s really alluring is the capability of big data to deliver action-able insights that lead to better—and more profitable—business decisions. However, delivering these value-added insights requires IT systems that allow users to ask a much more varied set of questions than that they can ask today. Questions that can help in unlocking trends and patterns from terra-bytes of data generated during the course of customer interactions. With better understanding, businesses can design sharper outcomes by designing faster go to market strategies, efficient executing and better results.

Voice&Data: What sets big data/analytics apart from traditional BI solutions?Amit Sanyal: The problem with tradi-tional BI is that it is prejudiced right from the very beginning. Traditional BI is used to run a predetermined query on data to justify outcomes (or user assumptions). Since query is always defined by the user, it is not able dig deeper into the data. Big data analytics works the other way around. It allows data to make the cor-relations. Algorithms are unleashed on data subsets to find patterns matching with interesting outcomes. Once the user has narrowed down to an algo-rithm, it is applied to other sets of data to predict outcomes.

have put a huge amount of pressure on operators to maximize customer life time value. Big data analytics platform has shown great results initially which has led to many operators betting big on the platform. In today’s customer centric environment, big data analytics provides the tools to engage customers in a pro-active manner which helps in creating a positive image of the operator in the minds of the customer. Operators using big data analytics platform have seen a sharp improvement in take up rate of new services (as they are contextually relevant to customer needs) and adoption of new services and engagement of customers have gone up manifold. This along with timely intervention has helped to bring down the churn rate helping operators get a significant competitive advantage in the market.

Voice&Data: Can you briefly run us through one of the cases from your customers where big data has brought significant change?Amit Sanyal: With increasing compe-tition disrupting the status quo, one South East telecom operator faced a sharp increase in churn rates, which eroded its market base and revenues. With the increasing penetration of af-fordable, dual SIM smart-phones, the incumbent operator realized the need to stop customers from churning. The operator deployed Mahindra Comviva’s churn prediction modelling, leading to significant results. The system was designed to predict churn with a high degree of accuracy (>60%) resulting in timely retention actions. The churn modelling was combined with a pool of customer retention offers for different churn reasons and customer behavior for value and volume retention.

Onkar Sharma onkars@cybermedia.co.in

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around Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Cities, OpenGtm technology for in-building wireless, and LTE/Wi-Fi convergence. Bro-cade and Ruckus believe that the integra-tion of Wi-Fi and the use of shared access or lightly licensed spectrum are critical to meeting the ever-growing demand for cov-erage, capacity, and consistency required for next-generation mobile services.

Voice&Data: How do you see the im-portance of network automation for adoption of new technologies like IOT, big data and cloud?Andrew Coward: The explosive growth in mobile data and all the new require-ments around Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity is putting an extreme pressure on mobile networks. While service providers do have the knowledge as to whey they have to leverage cloud computing, network virtualization, and software networking technologies, it’s really difficult to take legacy operating systems from traditional routing manufactures, squeeze them into a server, and expect to run tens or hundreds of instances across that server infrastructure.

Voice&Data: What’s your presence in India? Would you name some of your customers from India?Andrew Coward: Brocade is very strong in India and has a long customer line. Here are the Brocade’s new IP custom-ers in India:NxtGen: NxtGen Data Center & Cloud Services has become the latest IT ser-vice provider to adopt Brocade’s New IP

Voice&Data: How do you use acquisitions to strengthen your position?Andrew Coward: We have increased our presence in the service space more specifically after Brocade acquired Foundry in 2008. The routing products are deployed in many large service pro-viders and exchange products. Then the company acquired Vyatta in 2012 which gave us a new angle to compete and put us on a road toward software networking even before NFV came on the scene. The Vyatta products helped us to capitalize the business opportunities for virtual routing, virtual CPE, virtual firewall, and so on. Vyatta allowed us to start focus-ing on cloud service providers, and we began to build our larger service provider organization from there.

Most recently the company acquired Ruckus Wireless which has comple-mented Brocade’s enterprise networking portfolio. It has significantly strength-ened Brocade’s strategic presence in the broader service provider space, with Ruckus’ market-leading Wi-Fi position.

As companies move to digitize their business, they need an underlying net-work architecture that supports business agility. This new IP architecture enables the network to become a platform for innovation and for developing, delivering, and securing new applications.

Voice&Data: How does Ruckus Wireless empower Brocade’s position? What does it mean to customers?Andrew Coward: Wireless is a critical ac-cess technology and the combination of Brocade and Ruckus creates a new type of pure-play networking company, with solu-tions spanning from the data center to the wireless network edge. Also, the acquisi-tion is expected to accelerate cross-selling activities into the respective companies’ partner and customer bases, opening up new revenue opportunities for the combined company across a variety of verticals, including large enterprises, K-12 and higher education, government, hospitality, and service providersThe acquisition will strengthen our ability to tap emerging market opportunities

networking infrastructure solutions to increase business growth and innova-tion. The new network infrastructure, comprising Brocade vRouters and VDX 6740T switches, will enable NxtGen to streamline enterprise cloud services fulfillment at its high-density data centersTata Sky: Tata Sky is yet another customer which has been using Brocade FCX net-work switches for its call center opera-tions. Now, as part of a broader upgrade at its key data center that also increases data storage system capacity from Brocade, the company is set to deploy an efficient and highly scalable Ethernet fabric based on Brocade VDX 6740 switches and Brocade VCS Fabric technology.Videocon D2H: Brocade VDX 6720 switches were deployed at Videocon D2h’s new data center, which was specifi-cally designed to support virtualization and later at the company’s two other facilities in a second phaseMicromax: Selected low-latency Brocade VDX 6740 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switches as the network foundation of the new data center due to the strength of Brocade VCS Fabric technology, ease of configuration, operational automation, and cost-effective performance and scalability.Micromax has been using Brocade solu-tions to accelerate application perfor-mance, increase application availability and improve security. Besides, Brocade has a long list of custom-ers including Polaris Financial Technol-ogy, Reliance BIG Animation and Omega Healthcare, among others.

Onkar Sharma onkars@cybermedia.co.in

Wireless is a critical access technology and the combination of Brocade and Ruckus creates a new type of pure-play networking company, with solutions spanning from the data center to the wireless network edge.