Indian telecommunication market at present
The imminence of a host of telecom goodies for the Indian consumer could not have been more pronounced with the expected introduction of 3G and Mobile number portability. Backing this is the huge gamut of international players that keep the market abuzz with announcements of their anticipated product launches. Despite talks of dwindling profits & margins appearing to dent progress claims, continued growth along with news of more evolved services imply that that the industry will continue to tread its present path. Growth fueled by sheer size of consumer base rather than high ARPUs has not only sustained expansion of the telecom industry but has thrown open to many affordable telecom and a variety of lifeline services that come with it.
As consumer needs mature, the telecom industry will move towards a connected world that in a decade will be marked by trillions of networked devices doing far more than enabling simple communications. The connected world will see super-fast, highly efficient networks, constantly connected customers, and new connected devices connecting industries and impacting every single nook and corner of day to day lives. The telecom industry will be expected to outdo itself by continuing to extend to consumers not just everyday voice services but advanced telecom offerings of the connected world that are within their budgets. As difficult as this may sound, achieving this has and will continue to be a possibility. Service providers today need to focus on three primary aspects to keep pace with the industry’s growth and cater to changing demands.
- Expand quicker: by bringing new products and services to market faster, and adopting new, innovative business models faster than their competitors;
- Drive Experience by differentiating through a unique, real-time customer experience;
- Run Leaner by embracing effective and agile operations
In the Indian market context, achieving these core activities of expanding, driving experience need to be done with judicious use of available resources enabling quick investment and movement in wake of new technology offerings and market developments. This in turn leaves service providers with very little room for straddling on non-core functions. Also, it has been observed that specialization of the various activities entailing the entire spectrum of service provider results in efficiency, flexibility and huge amount of cost curtailing literally giving SPs the leanness for more action. The Indian telecom industry today has been therefore been relying on managed services to a very large extent for making quicker progress. OSS/BSS operations are successfully outsourced to strategic partners. These partners in turn are able to deploy IT operations and units for maximum improvement in services offered, network management, billing, consumer concern addressing, new product roll outs and consequently overall consumer experience.