Efficient telecom facilities provide enterprises with access to all kinds of information across the globe and help them stay connected with their employees.In the Service Providers’ Perspective session at the “Telecom for Large Enterprises” conference organised by tele.net, top officials from leading enterprise solution providers spoke about their major offerings. Excerpts…
Sunil Joshi
President, Enterprise Business, Tata Communications
All industries are undergoing a paradigm shift and are moving from plain vanilla products to services and solutions attached to that product. In the telecom space, there was a time when people used to go to stores to buy things like music and games, but now, they can download these applications anywhere and any time through the internet.
Telecommunications is no longer restricted to point-to-point. It has become diversified and is more about being part of the global landscape, the right network infrastructure to support enterprise growth, and the timely use of various applications.
The new services available in the market include managed solutions, IT and storage (managed infrastructure solutions), connectivity (managed Ethernet and wide area network solutions), convergence (unified communications and collaboration) and security (managed security solutions).
Consumers generally have four key IT and storage issues ?? cost, complexity, reliability and resources. Enterprises are very concerned about managing the cost of infrastructure and keeping it aligned with business growth. Most of the customers want costs to be either linear or less than linear. But with growing business complexities, enterprises are no longer restricted to a single product and a single market and have to deal with multiple products and markets. Resources are continuing to be a big challenge in refining the talent pool for all functions. As far as reliability is concerned, it is all about managing risk and ensuring scalability.
So what are the offerings that can resolve these issues? The new offerings should be scalable so that the enterprise has the flexibility to fly as and when required. New commercial models like “pay as you go” have to be introduced to enable the enterprises undertake better planning for the future. There has to be 24×7 security at the site, including disaster recovery and business continuity services.Finally, the service providers need to provide trained experts for L1/L2 support.
Another set of issues is related to convergence. It includes multiple devices and global business expansion leading to increased costs; the need for access-agnostic applications across multiple platforms; continuous monitoring, testing and upgrade requirements; and scalable, secure and always-on delivery of applications across the ecosystem.
The best convergence solution currently available in the market is telepresence. It reduces the travel time and cost while boosting productivity. For this, an enterprise can have hosted contact centres.Telepresence allows more frequent interaction amongst leaders and staff.
One of the biggest drivers of growth in the internet space is video. Today, there are a lot of social networking sites and most of them carry a bunch of videos, which have a high bandwidth requirement.
Amongst IT, information and communication technology (ICT) and telecom services, Tata Communications provides the second and third services. These include unified communications, enterprise mobility, network integration, network and hosted applications, contact centre, IP telephony, infrastructure support, network transport and conventional telephony. Our on-demand hosted contact centre solutions enhance productivity while lowering costs.
Sunil Kumar
Deputy Director-General, Enterprise Business, BSNL
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has come a long way from being a fixed line service provider to an integrated player offering a full suite of telecom services. On its agenda now is to make a mark in the enterprise space.
BSNL’s enterprise offerings include web services (web hosting, message hosting and web co-location), roaming services by virtual private dial-up network (VPDN)/ dial virtual private network (VPN), VSAT services; and EPABX services supporting all customer interfaces (analog line, digital line, DSL lines, IP lines and wireless), with multiple backhaul support.
Having the widest reach of copper cables in India, BSNL will allow its customers to build their own multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) cloud in a costeffective way. The company has about 300 points of presence (PoPs) across the country. The various services offered over BSNL’s MPLS network include narrowband services, broadband services, messaging, order portal, layer 2 VPN services, layer 3 VPN services and multicast.
For disaster recovery (DR), BSNL has a primary network operation centre (NOC) in Bangalore and a DR NOC at Pune. These have full fault management, configuration management, accounting management, provisioning management, security management, service level agreement (SLA) monitoring and capacity planning and augmentation facilities.
BSNL offers SLAs for MPLS VPN.These include commitments for availability and IP parameters (latency, packet loss, jitter) as well as reporting to the NOC.
BSNL also provides internet leased lines of 1:1 concentration. These are allowed for both non-internet service providers (ISPs) and ISPs, and improve the speed of traffic.
BSNL currently caters to a wide range of enterprise customers such as Union Bank of India, IFFCO, Food Corporation of India, National Highways Authority of India, Tata AIG Life Insurance, CitiFinancial, New India Assurance, ICICI Bank, Bombay Stock Exchange, National Stock Exchange, Maruti Suzuki, MRF, Kingfisher Airlines, Hindustan Unilever, Doordarshan, Larsen & Toubro and Reliance Industries.
Its recent assignments include a turnkey project for connecting all superthermal power stations of NTPC, implementing video conferencing solutions at 77 sites for the union government’s defence accounts department, and at 539 sites for the Central Board of Excise and Customs.
BSNL is gearing up to meet the new requirements of large enterprises. It is shifting from a network-centric model (network availability, mean time to recovery, jitter, class of service, packet loss and round-trip delay) to a solution-centric model (feature enrichment, network optimisation, better end-user experience, improved service delivery and proactive problem management).
With plans to launch 3G services by December 2008, BSNL is looking forward to providing fixed and wireless converged solutions for large enterprises. The company also wants to make it big in the unified conferencing space, comprising audio, video and web conferencing.
BSNL has evolved from being merely a bandwidth service provider to a managed telecom services provider, and is now headed towards becoming a complete IT services and business solution provider.
Manoj Paul
Chief Operating Officer, Western Region, Enterprise Services, Bharti Airtel
An enterprise’s communication desirables include almost everything, from anytime and anywhere access, reliability, security, compatibility and scalability to future readiness. Bharti Airtel provides a full range of managed services for all kinds of businesses. This includes managed data centre services, managed IP telephony/ telepresence/ contact centre services, managed messaging/share point portal services and managed customer premises equipment (CPE)/security services. Managed CPE/ security services include CPE service initialisation, CPE maintenance, performance management, security management, configuration management and fault management.
With the small and medium enterprise (SME) segment emerging as a key user of telecom services, Bharti Airtel has been pushing SMEs as well as the lower end of the large enterprise segment to outsource their email servers to a service provider, as in-house server hosting is very expensive.
As enterprises expand their footprint in the same city to multiple locations, they need high speed connectivity for better communication (in terms of both voice and data transfer). For managing such growth, metro Ethernet is the best solution as it is scalable from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 1,000 Mbps, with easy granularity as well as upgrades that require no change in the router port. Going further, as the businesses expand into multiple cities, a managed services provider like Bharti Airtel can provide a separate MPLS cloud connecting all regional offices to the branch offices and the headquarters. An MPLS cloud is characterised by high resiliency, high scalability and low costs.
There are various technology options for connectivity, starting from a traditional fixed line network to a modern satellite network. Multiple last mile solutions are available for different needs and infrastructures, such as copper (leased line, dial-up, ISDN, DSL), fibre, radio (point-to-point, point-to-multipoint), VSAT and GPRS/EDGE.
The internet is no longer a vanilla product and has evolved to become a multi-featured product. The range of IP options has expanded from a standard and classic internet to shared internet, managed internet, internet over MPLS, usagebased internet, premium internet, IP transit and dual PoP solutions.
An audio conferencing solution allows multiple people from different locations to connect over a landline/mobile. This can be done on a local call to the service provider’s audio conferencing bridge number. Airtel offers a suite of conferencing solutions. No prior booking/reservation is required for such a conference. The infrastructure offered by Airtel includes hardware (end-terminals, bridge, studio) and end-to-end managed services (managed MPLS/internet connectivity, 24-hour support, MPLS-RT bandwidth).
Then there is telepresence, which makes people feel as if they are present at a location without physically being there.The key features of Airtel’s telepresence service include multi-party conferences, global reach through Airtel Bridge and a hybrid network interface (IP, ISDN, internet). The service is billed on a monthly basis.
The other key offerings from Airtel include mobile ticketing, mobile banking, SMS applications, toll-free call centre service, sales automation on mobile devices and vehicle tracking service.
