Digital innovations are now shaking up every industry: There's a much greater sense of urgency among the mainstream players to reorganize themselves as digital businesses.

Regardless of how you view "digital disruption" -- angst-inducing threat or energizing opportunity -- it's no longer a theoretical proposition. Digital innovations are now shaking up every industry -- the result of a confluence of three main trends.

The first is a technological one. Advances in cloud computing, data analytics, video, social networking, and, most important, the consumer-funded infrastructure of mobile devices and connectivity have laid the groundwork for business as unusual.

The second trend is a more social one. The broad consumerization of IT not only has made the unwashed masses comfortable with all manner of apps and devices, turning them into ready customers of innovative digital products, services, and features, but it also has made CXOs and line-of-business execs more keenly aware of what digital innovation can potentially do to transform their companies and industries. So they're leading the charge. Whether you like it or not, CEOs, CMOs, sales executives, HR leaders, and other "non-IT" types are involved directly in setting digital strategy and making the requisite technology purchases.

The third is a commercial trend, an offshoot of the first two. The biggest digital natives are getting restless to move into new markets -- for example, the search giant Google into financial, telecom, home automation, and package delivery; the social networker LinkedIn into media and content. They now have market caps to grow and shareholders to please. They're upping their game.

As a result, there's a much greater sense of urgency among the mainstream players to reorganize themselves as digital businesses. 

Whether you're the digital hunter or the hunted, all this digital disruption requires a new brand of leadership. "Becoming a digital business isn't an 'IT project.' It requires change across the organization, from sales and customer support to purchasing and product development."

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Four sourcing strategies from automakers, companies will be better able to foster innovation and efficiency in their IT outsourcing

As many companies have discovered, much to their dismay, IT outsourcing doesn't always go as planned. In case after case, the lower costs, better service quality, and greater agility everyone was expecting turn out to be elusive. Looking for lessons in failed engagements has become a virtual pastime for the IT sector, yet the disappointments continue. Perhaps it is time to draw insights on outsourcing from another sector -- specifically from one that does a better job of it, the automotive industry.

By following four sourcing strategies from automakers, companies will be better able to foster innovation and efficiency in their IT outsourcing. Just as important, it will spur companies to manage IT as a core component of their business. 

1. Retain expertise: Rebuilding IT expertise will take time, so companies should get on their way. They can decide if any outsourced services could be taken back in-house, and add technical experts to their procurement teams. They can prioritize emerging key technologies, such as virtualization and the cloud, and gradually build skills by hiring or developing the necessary talent. Finally, sourcing and vendor management must become integrated parts of an IT career path and not treated as an end station, as is sometimes the case.

2. Pay attention to processes that provide an edge: In IT, all outsourced processes -- whether a "differentiator" or a more commoditized task -- tend to be handled in the similar, hands-off fashion, with the company relying on the vendor to get things right. The automotive industry approach would let companies' in-house IT teams focus their efforts where the payoff would be greatest. For instance, at a logistics company, one differentiating process might be the routing of trucks. The IT application that supports that routing should be flagged for special treatment, such as stepped-up collaboration or supervision. For here, improvements aren't just beneficial, they can bring competitive advantage. 

3. Challenge suppliers to deliver improvements: In many engagements, ambiguous contracts, hands-off management, and difficulty switching providers (or a reluctance to do so) give vendors little reason to focus on improvements. To get closer to the automobile model, IT organizations should move to standardized environments when possible, particularly in the cloud. They should also consider the "champion-challenger" model, where one provider does the bulk of the work, but another does some of it (and can step in further if necessary). Another approach is to assign one provider the execution of a task, but give another a quality control role, making sure the work gets done. 

4. Emphasize transparency: IT organizations, which typically pay for services on a volume-centric measure -- be it MIPS, terabytes, or number of transactions -- rarely have such an inside view. To gain such a view, they could devote procurement staff to better understanding costs, as well as promote more dialogue and information sharing with providers. As procurement staff members develop more expertise, they'll be better able to evaluate the pricing and quality of the services they are sourcing.

There is a reason IT organizations embrace outsourcing: It can really deliver benefits. But to see them, companies need to get back in the driver's seat, creating the right incentives, and balance, in their sourcing relationships. By embracing these four lessons from the auto industry, they can do just that -- and enjoy a smoother road ahead.

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Customer Support and the Engaged Enterprise: Customer service is re-emerging as the core business strategy

The IT world is undergoing a massive transformation where the traditional view of ERP at the core of the enterprise, with CRM applications wrapped around it, is replaced with CRM at the center of the enterprise. This is a revolution in thinking, with the customer finally placed in the center of planning and execution, and with CRM systems serving as the core of the IT thought process.

Customer service is re-emerging as the core business strategy to create a winning customer experience. Great service needs to be consistent across all mobile devices, as well as social and digital media channels. It also needs to be personalized and consistent with marketing efforts.

Customer service agents, advisors and the corporate websites/mobile sites often fail because they are unprepared when they engage customers. Many small or midsize businesses (SMBs) and enterprises have still not invested in multichannel customer service strategies and, instead, opt for a conglomeration of point solutions, enabling those vendors to thrive. The Web self-service and peer-to-peer community software markets operate on a parallel plane for companies looking at nonagent-based support available to customers through a company's website. The wide use of mobile Internet and the rich customer experiences powered by multichannel engagement in the consumer space will prompt customers to seek a mobile customer service application as their first option for support.

Recommendations

Collect the metrics and key performance indicators about the strengths and weaknesses in cross-channel support of the customer to make the case to add analytics tools to customer service.

1. Collect the metrics and key performance indicators about the strengths and weaknesses in cross-channel support of the customer to make the case to add analytics tools to customer service.
2. Focus on developing the social customer support skills of social media managers and customer service agents, rather than emphasizing the technologies at this point in the market's maturity.
3. Invest in Web self-service applications that support integration or are integrated with peer-to-peer community software applications and allow for a shared formal and social knowledge base to increase the likelihood of customers finding answers online to their questions.
4. Develop a mobile customer service strategy as part of your overall customer engagement strategy, as well as a clear picture of the mobile channels and the engagement method, because more customers will only interact with your organization via a mobile device.

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Building the talent pool for Big Data and analytics requires a blend of mass and customised approach. The mass training and orientation should be planned at high school and undergraduate levels.

Is Our Education System Gearing Up For the Big Data Boom?

The explosion of Big Data and the impact it has created on the businesses—big or small has rattled every one resulting in awe and amazement in some quarters and uncertainty and realisation of lack of readiness in some others. Whatever may be the nature of current response and readiness, one thing everyone is agreed upon is the inevitability of having to build capabilities to embrace this new phenomenon and take advantage of it rather than getting left behind.

According to IDC estimates the size of the ‘digital universe’ was around 130 exabytes about ten years back, which grew to 1,227 exabytes by 2010 and by 2015 it is expected to become 7,910 exabytes. What is unique about this data growth is that more than 90% of the data has got created in just last two years. With more and more sophisticated tools and methods being made available to extract as well as analyse data from customer interactions, emails, web browsing, social networks and machine sensors and a variety of new device options continuing to be made available enabling more and more web transactions, the data deluge is expected to impact every aspect of the economy. No business or for that matter even not for profit businesses can ignore the significance of Big Data. However, there is a yawning gap in terms of capabilities that businesses possess to take full advantage of the opportunities emanating from their web presence.

While intuition will always play an important role in decision making, ignoring data that could be tapped and made use of would lead to sub optimal decision making. This approach has to be inculcated with employees across the board. This leads us to the question of how is our education system getting geared to produce talent which is equipped with skills to think and act around the use of Big Data.

Building the talent pool for Big Data and analytics requires a blend of mass and customised approach. The mass training and orientation should be planned at high school and undergraduate levels. Customised or advanced techniques and curriculum could be introduced as part of the post graduate studies. Hence interventions should be planned in select schools, develop the proof of concept and train the teachers to tune their minds to the eventual areas where their students are expected to be contributing.

Once the system is ready to take off, it may also be worthwhile to consider setting up special schools for high school education with the objective of nurturing multi-disciplinary approach to teaching and lay a strong foundation for exploring the new frontiers of computing power leading to careers in research, applications and product development. The pre-eminence of the Indian businesses in the global knowledge services driven by Big Data and analytics is possible to be realised when we are able to create entry barriers for other countries and therefore we need innovation and the will power to have a radically different approach to education, skilling and talent pool development.

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Transforming Business Performance: As important as the network is, the applications running atop that network are even more important

Businesses are rapidly adopting virtualization, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS applications broadly across the enterprise to minimize costs and enable seamless collaboration and communication. This is significantly straining the traditional network paradigm. IT organizations globally are faced with the challenge to transform network architectures to deliver the right performance and reliability cost-effectively while retaining control.

Market forces driving change include:

• Decreasing cost and increasing reliability of Internet infrastructure 

• Growing diversity of applications, data, and devices across all networks

• Accelerated adoption of private and public cloud computing infrastructure

In a world combining public and private resources, the network itself needs to get hybrid, combining the strengths of the highly reliable Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks with the ubiquity and lower cost of Internet infrastructure. However, change towards more complex network architectures requires planning.

Top 3 IT considerations:

• Identify and Prioritize Applications: Identify, prioritize, and optimize applications to deliver the best performance. Understand application criticality by business, usage patterns and trends, and bandwidth consumption. Understand the current network delivery path and define the optimal delivery path in a Hybrid Network architecture — whether the internal Ethernet network, the wide- area MPLS network, a virtual private network or a hybrid cloud network.

• Define and Establish SLAs for Users and Businesses: Collaborate with line of business owners to identify, define, and establish right application-level Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure the right performance, reliability, and disaster recovery required for the target end users and business processes. This will influence network policies, network architecture design, and network capacity planning in relation to the cost.

• Real-Time Monitoring and Performance Management: Implement new or augment existing tools to gain application level and network visibility for real time performance monitoring to aid in troubleshooting and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

In aggregate, the network is more complex than ever before with the addition of hybrid networks that

incorporate the public Internet infrastructure as a way to scale corporate bandwidth cost-effectively. Supporting this architectural transformation requires IT to not only adopt new capabilities but to also

re-evaluate the existing infrastructure design, deployment, and management to maximize the utilization of hybrid resources. This perspective focuses primarily on the results of the technology like performance, reliability, and user productivity. As important as the network is, even more important are the applications running atop that network.

URS Systems also helps IT analyze the enterprise ecosystem across all network links and applications, whether extending to cloud systems or branch offices. It can analyze the most important applications affecting users and IT, from Microsoft productivity applications to accelerating applications in virtualized data centers running on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.

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Business Excellence, Innovation is necessary and there is no Innovation without risk.

BI has been one of the most important business initiatives providing positive impact on the health of organizations. Usually, questions are raised on the maturity of the BI initiative and the technology backbone to yield business benefits. And after getting the desired benefits from the BI initiative, the obvious question has been “What next?”.

For more than two decades, organizations have been leveraging Business Intelligence (BI) platforms with the sole objective of ‘management by facts’ for business benefits. Traditionally, BI platforms have been spanning across Information Integration (e.g. ETL, EAI/ESB, CDC), Information Storage (e.g. Data Warehouse, Cubes, Metadata) and Information Analytics (e.g. Enterprise Reports, OLAP Reports, Dashboards and Data Mining) components. Over this period, the landscape of BI has changed with the touch of business integration and innovation. And this change is not just limited to the corporate world.

In the current dynamic market, the rate of change is faster than yesterday and what we do today may not be relevant tomorrow. E.g. change in the landline tariff didn’t happen for more than a decade, but mobile tariff and service plans are changing on an almost quarterly basis. To survive and grow in the vibrant market space, every organization is facing outrageous competition, business convergence, demand for profitable growth and intense pressure on cost. Organizations are becoming innovative in their approach to make business truly performance driven at Strategic, Tactical as well as Operational levels.

For business excellence, innovation is necessary and there is no innovation without risk. Hence for better performance, it is necessary to minimize the area outside the area under control i.e. the Risk Area. Precision in predicting risk (e.g. credit risk, market risk, operational risk) with BI provides the advantage of having more Capital available for operations as well as innovation e.g. Regulatory Authorities relax the Cash Reserve requirement, if predictions in Risk Management are consistently well under the threshold.

In spite of availability of advanced BI technologies in the market, most companies are still struggling to get the BI foundation right i.e. to set up an Enterprise Data Warehouse and governance and get reports and dashboards. Once the right foundation is set for BI, adoption of the new technologies and the path towards  institutionalization of innovation can be laid out. In the vibrant market space, the BI Program can provide a path to Certainty in Experience, while continuing the journey towards perfection. We always need to remember that it is a journey and not a destination!

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How Data Center Infrastructure Management Software Improves Planning and Cuts Operational Costs

Business executives are challenging their IT staffs to convert data centers from cost centers into producers of business value. Data centers can make a significant impact to the bottom line by enabling the business to respond more quickly to market demands. This paper demonstrates, through a series of examples, how data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software tools can simplify operational processes, cut costs, and speed up information delivery.

According to the Uptime Institute (a division of the 451 Group) the market for data center infrastructure management systems will grow from $500 Million in 2010 to $7.5 Billion by 2020. IT and business executives have realized that hundreds of thousands of dollars in
energy and operational costs can be saved by improved physical infrastructure planning, by minor system reconfiguration, and by small process changes. The systems which allow management to leverage these savings consist of modern data center physical infrastructure (i.e., power and cooling) management software tools. Legacy reporting systems, designed to support traditional data centers, are no longer adequate for new “agile” data centers that need to manage constant capacity changes and dynamic loads.

Some data center operators do not use any physical infrastructure management tools. This can be risky. One operator who only managed 15 racks at a small manufacturing firm, for example, felt that the data center operations “tribal knowledge” he had acquired over the years could help him handle any threatening situation. However, over time, his 15 racks became much denser. His energy bills went up and his cooling and power systems drifted out of balance. At one point, when he added a new server, he overloaded a branch circuit
and took down an entire rack.

New management software Planning & Implementation tools improve IT room allocation of power and cooling (planning), provide rapid impact analysis when a portion of the IT room fails (operations), and leverage historical data to improve future IT room performance
(analysis). These three types of Planning & Implementation tools–planning, operations, and analysis–are each explained in the following sections this paper. Data center facility software tools (e.g., building management systems) are not discussed.

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Platforms can fundamentally change the way Banks perform key functions

Platforms are pretty buzzy. The term is all over banking and technology, especially for core back office functions in risk and finance. Nearly every Tom, Dick, and Susie in vendor space uses the term “platform.”

But not all platforms are created equal, and some don’t even qualify as such. This isn’t just semantics; this definition matters. Platforms have powerful features that allow financial institutions to do things better, faster, and cheaper than ever before; the latest generation takes it to another level.

1. Adaptability is crucial in risk and finance applications. There have been a myriad of new demands over the past decade, and most financial institutions have struggled to keep up.

2. A real platform changes the eternal buy versus build question to “buy and build.” Yes, there’s an embedded assumption in this that financial institutions don’t build platforms. There are always exceptions, but in general the pressures facing internal IT departments are simply too great for them to build a real platform. 

3. A platform is built of components that allow for the creation of higher order software services that can be reused for different things across the enterprise. Rule engines, cashflow engines, workflow processing tools, and so on come together in a way that allows for customization as a core design principle. 

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Role of IT in building SMART CITY in India:

Information and communication technologies will be deeply embedded in the fabric of both old and new cities and will change the way we think of city operations and how we live and work in these environments. One way to fast track planning and construction of such smart cities is to include the private sector in India within a given framework for such new townships by the government. This would need to be specific to the creation of such smart cities in designated areas, so that existing and outdated laws do not become a barrier. These activities would need to be undertaken by approved consortia (consisting of experts in smart city planning/consulting groups/infrastructure and urban developers/IT experts), which would assist in conceptualizing, designing world class smart city clusters.

Creation of such new satellite cities need to be closely tied to the concepts of sustainability. This requires these new cities to be “smart,” i.e. creating new types of transport systems to avoid congestion that is currently so rampant in many Asian towns, construction using low energy housing materials, newer water harvesting techniques and extensive use of IT systems on cloud in running various urban functions and the provision of e-government services to its citizens. Moreover, such cities should be self-sufficient in being able to create gainful employment for residents so that cross city travel is minimized.

India is expected to see massive urbanization along the same lines of what we have seen in China, where urbanization crossed 50% last year and is projected to cross 75% in the next 5 years.

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The five "most important consideration[s] for future ERP implementations are:

The majority of companies running ERP systems rate them as "basic" or "adequate. What users want are more flexible and accessible ERP apps that will enable many employees to access information via smartphones and tablets. It's no revelation that many incumbent ERP systems are used only by a few power users who can deal with wonky, dated screens from within the corporate network.

What's on the short list for future ERP implementations? The five "most important consideration[s] for future ERP implementations are:

1. Fast time to value
2. Simplicity for all users
3. Easy collaboration with customers, suppliers, and employees
4. Mobile access for all employees
5. A choice of on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployment approaches

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Department of Telecommunications plans to restructure USO fund modalities

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is working on a plan to restructure the Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund’s modalities, under which the share of the revenues of private telecom operators will be reduced from the current 5 per cent. DoT will take the final decision in this regard by end-October 2014.

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India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for Cloud Services:

Current Analysis has released its study titled “Enterprise ICT Investment Insights Study 2014” which indicates that cloud computing is the top priority among Indian enterprises. According to the study, a significant 68 per cent of enterprises in India, with 100-plus employees, are using cloud-based services, while the remaining 32 per cent plan to do so over the next 24 months. This is in line with trends in the larger Asia-Pacific market, where the adoption of cloud-based services is as high as 65 per cent. This study spans 19 countries across four key regions.

The study also finds that the scale of cloud services adoption easily surpasses those of other new-generation ICT services, including Big Data and Enterprise Mobility. While 39 per cent of the respondents ranked Cloud as their top investment priority in India, 16 per cent said it would be Big Data while 12 per cent favoured Enterprise Mobility. Network Security jointly ranked as second highest investment priority, along with Big Data.

“India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for cloud services, led thus far by the private cloud segment. “It is highly notable that cloud has emerged as a leading investment priority for Indian enterprises, surpassing even Network Security investments. However, this certainly doesn’t amount to the ICT decision makers lowering their guards when it comes to the all-vital area of IT security.

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Design Once, Deploy Everywhere: Mobile First, It’s time to rethink things

Today's platform developers plan for mobile enterprise applications with the highest levels of security and access control. Soon the enterprise's issue of mobile security will become moot.

In August, a survey by Software Advice showed that only 39 percent of employees work under a “bring your own device” (BYOD) policy for mobile technology in the workplace. More surprisingly, 20% didn't even know whether there was such a policy in their organizations. That means, when it comes to enterprise mobility, employees either are making up their own rules, or just not following any.

At this point, some information security specialists are probably clutching their heads, wondering what these statistics mean for workplace data security in the mobile world. They can breathe easy. Application development technology is getting to the point where businesses simply shouldn’t have to worry about mobile security issues, and can instead focus on driving new business value from mobile channels.

BYOD policies for security and engagement are becoming a thing of the past – as long as forward-thinking companies take a device-agnostic cloud-based approach to enterprise application development.

A new concept -- the enterprise application platform -- will help revolutionize software delivery on the desktop and on mobile devices in the next few years.   An application platform enables the creation of sophisticated and modern custom applications by putting at the developer’s disposal a set of powerful construction tools that are pre-designed for mobile security.

There is so much more to the mobile business environment than instant messages and email. Consequently, more IT departments are starting to think about business value and how their enterprise applications work on mobile devices.

In most cases, the conclusion they've drawn is that enterprise applications are too complex to be rendered on mobile devices. A mobile front end alone is not sufficient (the thinking goes); the entire application likely must be rewritten for the mobile world. But building new applications for each device is a costly proposition.

It’s time to rethink things.

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INVENTION IS HAPPENING, BUT ACTUALLY QUITE FAST

When things are getting interesting and moving as fast as they are in the communications world, it is easy to get ahead of yourself. Sometimes you seem to go round in circles. It is advisable, if this happens, not to meet yourself coming the other way. 

We are definitely still at the stage of selling ‘data’ but we are beginning to make this cloudy concept clearer. We are selling speed, because speed delivers value to make certain bandwidth hungry applications work properly. And we are selling Voice 2.o in order to fight back against OTT voice players. Confusion is easy to catch amongst the wealth of services now being offered by operators around the world.

A simple ‘Top Ten’ LTE services from operators around the world, it takes us on a concise but interesting journey from speed, through shared plans to sponsored data and beyond. It is interesting to compare what operators in different regions are doing, both within their own region and beyond.

You can sell speed in different ways of course. Once you have customers who have run up to their data limits – a reasonably common occurrence as we know – you can offer to restore their speed and give them more data for a few days, thus selling them a service and solving a problem for the customer.

The majority of operators will be launching Voice over LTE in the next two years. This demands guaranteed quality, and policy management and real time charging can manage this. What it also means, apart from offering customers ‘free’ high quality voice, is that expensive legacy networks and systems can be ‘recycled’ and therefore costs can be cut.

‘Beyond’ sponsored data, some operators are now collaborating with OTT players and this trend will mature and become commonplace in the next two to three years. Offering access to applications such as Facebook and other content partners for free means the partner gets access to the operator’s customers and the operators gets a deal for his. Once hooked, customers trying out this free access can be migrated onto longer term offers.

Whether the offer is a simple speed or data one, or whether it is something more sophisticated, the critical factor is to enable the purchase or acceptance of the deal on the device, as your customer thinks about it. This is a turning point for the communications industry, this acceptance that everything must be responsive in real time.

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Get ready for next generation Digital Commerce

In the last decade the telecom industry has experienced a data explosion thanks to the increase in subscription and voice data records, wireless information, geo-location details, social media and data usage by customers and service providers.

The complicated world of telecommunications analytics is nothing new and telcos have been long term pioneers of big data techniques which began with the building of call detail record (CDR) data warehouses. This data was used to better understand customer usage patterns and make data-driven decisions about how to package subscriptions and packages, cross and upsell add on services and options, and reduce customer churn.

Everyone understands that making sense of big data is the key to winning the battle for customers. Data analytics can deliver powerful insights into what customers want to achieve at every touch-point (channel), make it possible for organisations to maintain traction on customers as they migrate between touch-points, and support the generation of content and promotions that are personalized and highly relevant to customers.

But the big data challenge is set to get even bigger. Catalogs with tens of thousands of product variations are becoming the rule rather than the exception as telcos develop and manage ever more sophisticated and complex service bundles that incorporate devices, voice and data plans alongside subscriptions to gaming, live TV, film, music and video content providers.

What’s more, the proliferation of data sources and types means data no longer fits into neat easy-to- consume structures. Today’s omni-channel telcos enterprises need to be able to handle content, physical data points, processes, inventory, search, streaming data, social, text, mobile, web and more. All of which requires real-time data capture and analysis.

Master data management capabilities are now a ‘must have’ if telcos are to leverage their transactional, operational and customer behavior intelligence to the max. Having data readily accessible so analytics can run in real or near-real time is critical to enabling intelligence-driven merchandising and the delivery of a highly personalized experience that stays relevant as customers move between channels.

Get ready for next generation digital commerce

At the end of the day delivering an enriched customer experience – regardless of channel – is a primary goal and big data, when effectively managed, can power personalization engines to deliver better and more relevant content that helps move customers along the buying cycle to transact and convert.

Understanding and visualizing how customers migrate between touch-points, and what they expect to do (and achieve) at every touch-point makes it possible to give customers ‘what they want, when they want it’. Delivering a unified and enriched customer experience may also include delivering richer and more consistent product information, seamless transaction capabilities across every channel, and options to access the entire product range regardless of channel; for example by providing in-store kiosks that give customers the option of ordering catalogue items currently not available or stocked in store.

Utilising this intelligence, telcos can deliver loyalty offers that reduce the risk of customer churn, stimulate demand – for example, by offering high data consuming subscribers additional value-add services – and minimise the risk of failing to capitalise on opportunities by redirecting customers to the appropriate channel or storefront for their immediate requirements.

Achieving all this depends on next generation digital commerce platforms that make it possible to implement personalisation rules based on an individual’s behaviours and engagement preferences, generating product recommendations and self-care options that are relevant and appropriate to the immediate engagement encounter. All of this will depend on the ability to connect events captured on the network (usage behaviour) with other behaviours, such as topping up a prepaid account or purchasing a new SIM at the individual customer level.

Recognising and responding to these ‘key moments’ is decisive; creating a ‘brand for life’ long tail relationship with subscribers depends on a telcos’ ability to match relevant service bundles and options with consumer profiles at critical break/renew time points. In other words, achieving retention goals will depend on the ability to provide timely and relevant supported selling and appropriate recommendations in real-time.

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Telecom Operators are innovating in one space and disrupting in another space, leveraging the cloud technology."

Indian telecom operators are now aggressively investing in cloud strategy to bring innovative services and products to the market while looking to implement data analytics to get more revenue from subscribers. Mobile Phone Operators have realised that their investment in cloud strategy will be very useful for their overall service portfolio.

For instance, European telcos have started innovative services line 'Gaming on Demand', wherein the gaming structure is on a cloud and a user can play it through a remote control by paying a subscription and are expecting the trend to come to India soon.

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DoT to ask global vendors to declare value-addition levels under a self-certification system

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is planning to introduce stringent norms to ensure that foreign telecom vendors meet local value-addition targets to qualify for government contracts under India's preferential market access (PMA) policy.

As per DoT, the global vendors will have to declare VA (value-addition) levels under a self-certification system that will have built-in penalties in case of false declarations and incentives for compliance.

Declared VA levels will be monitored jointly by the DoT's technical wing, the Telecom Engineering Centre, and the Standardisation Testing & Quality Certification directorate, which is part of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology.

The proposed self-certification system is going to be a key element of PMA policy which calls for minimum 30 per cent local sourcing of security sensitive technology products for government contracts across central ministries, excluding defence.

Currently, the consultations are underway to finalise local VA targets for about 23 security-sensitive technology products.

The VA targets and timeframes will be fixed after a thorough assessment of considerations from the global network vendors as well. The previous government had recommended that global vendors meet 45 per cent and 65 per cent of their local value-addition targets by 2017 and 2020 respectively, a suggestion that was met with protests from leading trade bodies across the US, Europe and Japan

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