“People are ready and the devices are there for mobile VC but the connectivity is missing”
Bala Mahadevan, CEO, India, and Saurabh Sanghoee, Head of Global Services, India of Orange Business Services, talked to Prashant L Rao about the service provider’s focus areas in India as well as trends like MDM, M2M and tele-radiology
Tell us about your focus areas in India.
Bala Mahadevan: We offer enterprise connectivity and have about a thousand people doing system integration work in areas like UC, collaboration solutions (audio/video/Web conferencing and Telepresence).
Typically, UC solutions are consumed in a big way by the BPO sector. Is that still the case?
Mahadevan: The BPO sector has been sluggish during the past six to nine months. It’s because of their own demand patterns being slow and there’s also some amount of nervousness on CAPEX because of the economy and the falling Rupee pushing up the prices of routers etc.
One issue that consistently crops up is that of interoperability. What is Orange Business Services doing on that front?
Saurabh Sanghoee: We have built a service called Open Video Presence. We build the bridge and you can own the endpoints or we can do it for you. The long and short of it is that we connect the endpoints for you.
Telepresence is typically seen as a rather expensive solution. Do you find it being widely adopted by your customers?
Sanghoee: If you are just trying to bring in communication, you don’t need that. If you are trying to bring ease to the experience, then Telepresence starts to make sense. It’s the Rolls Royce of the collaboration world.
We hear a lot about mobility. Are people using mobile phones for video conferencing?
Sanghoee: The problem is one of connectivity. Even in Delhi or Mumbai, you could see your 3G connection drop. 3G has been over-enthusiastically rolled out. Even 4G has been rolled out technically, but what’s the quality of service?
Mahadevan: People are ready and devices are there but the connectivity is missing.
Sanghoee: In the enterprise, where people have access to Wi-Fi, we do see people using their iPads for this purpose.
That brings us to BYOD.
Mahadevan: A person joining a company today has different expectations today. Companies have to cater to that. IT companies that have thousands of employees need a solution.
Sanghoee: That’s where we come in. We manage all platforms and variants including Symbian. Demand for MDM is going to skyrocket. The conversation starts with the customer talking about wiping data and then they get into allowing mobile access to the workspace. Or it starts with email and then they look at SFA etc.
How do you set the ball rolling when it comes to mobility?
Mahadevan: In the case of MDM and the like, you have to build the need as well as the confidence. We start with the CISO or the CIO’s security office. We are working on some large deals here.
What else are you looking at?
Sanghoee: We are also looking at the DR/BC side. The traditional model was that you had to have a DR site connected with equivalent pipes etc. You probably used the DR site once in its lifetime. The new model is that you could have ten thousand workers going online using mobile devices. It’s like a continuity plan based on a mobile offering where the actual platform is somewhere else.
There’s a lot of activity in the data center space. What’s OBS doing there?
Mahadevan: We are doing a lot around data centers, especially in the public sector. We build and manage facilities.
Security is an area where there seems to be a lot happening. Are you playing in that space?
Mahadevan: We play in surveillance, hacking and proactive monitoring. We also offer security as a consulting practice.
In terms of industry verticals, where’s the action?
Mahadevan: Many of our services have been readily absorbed by the IT sector. The public sector is a growth area and so we have called it out as a vertical and have dedicated sales/pre-sales team for it. We have also called out healthcare.
Sanghoee: Today, we are a third-party auditor for the SWAN projects in Uttarkhand, Haryana, Chattisgarh, etc. We are looking to expand that relationship.
In healthcare, the cost of the CAT Scan/MRI machine isn’t the problem. The software that does the advanced tele-radiology diagnostics or the slicing and 3D imaging is the stumbling block. We want to offer that through the Cloud so that the smaller players can offer these services.
In Pharma, the market is growing and many of the players are European, many of whom are our global customers.
Mahadevan: We have deployed a lot of M2M solutions. The Singapore MRT fleet management system was done by us. We are talking to a few road transportation companies in India.
