Indian IT Industry

Ameet · Post by **Ameet** » 16 Feb 2010 04:30

Adam aims to take bite out of Apple in iPad war

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/b ... 027796.ece

It has already brought the world a £1,400 car, now India is set to release an “iPad for the masses” — a new tablet computer that technology experts say could mount a challenge to Apple’s latest gadget.

The new device, called the Adam, has been designed by Notion Ink, a start-up based in the technology hub of Hyderabad. The company was founded by three 24-year-old graduates from India’s elite technical universities who have relied on family and friends for seed funding.

Their debut product has already caused a stir in tech circles, with several industry blogs raving about the Adam's super-energy efficient components and its unique display, which can switch from a colour touch screen to a black and white “e-ink” alternative that can be read in full sunlight.

The CrunchGear website said: “It just might (sway the Apple faithful away) with the proper support.”

Another industry blog added: “Apple may have widespread interest with its iPad, but the Notion Ink Adam has geek juices flowing.”

Notion Ink admits it has its work cut out in competing against the might of Apple’s marketing machine, perhaps the most formidable in the corporate world. It is optimistic, however, that the Adam could make India, now famous for its IT services sector, a player in consumer electronics.

Sachin Ralhan, one of the company’s co-founders, said: “Adam and iPad are based on completely different technologies and are marketed differently. Apple being a strong brand comes at a price premium while we wish to cater to the masses.”

He added: “We see a potential simultaneous India-US launch at the end of June.”

The Adam, which has been designed in India but will be built in Taiwan, is expected to cost about $325. In the US, the iPad starts at $499.

The Indian gadget will be powered by Google’s Android software platform. A competition with a $1million prize is being planned for developers to build applications to run on it.

Notion Ink is claiming the Adam will have “days” of battery life in its e-ink mode — compared with 10 hours standard battery life for the iPad. The Adam will play music for 25 days, give 16 hours internet browsing and will play high definition video for 8 hours, Mr Ralhan said.

It will also support Flash — the video standard most widely on the web — which the iPad does not.

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 16 Feb 2010 07:56

Wow! The Adam looks pretty good. Hard to believe an Indian company made it! Read more about it here :

http://www.slashgear.com/notion-ink-ada ... n-0969281/

Watch the video they have lower down on the page. The sh&t is impressive.

pgbhat · Post by **pgbhat** » 16 Feb 2010 08:34

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 16 Feb 2010 08:59

they are using Android for the OS it looks like.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 16 Feb 2010 13:08

^^^Actually Adam uses Android not Chrome OS.

Neshant wrote:depends on what they mean by 'computer'.

A kubmyuder is a michine which can process numbers saar!

Rest is just piling stuff higher and deeper on top of the number crunching.

SwamyG · Post by **SwamyG** » 16 Feb 2010 22:41

Ah...adam discussions are going on here as well. More and more geeky and techie folks are being swept away by the specs. One site says it is "seen as the techies iPad" and "spec wipes the floor with Apple's iPad". Adam might not end up in everybody's hands; but if the company delivers what they have promised then they are going to make several people very happy.

Sriman · Post by **Sriman** » 16 Feb 2010 23:41

SwamyG wrote:Ah...adam discussions are going on here as well. More and more geeky and techie folks are being swept away by the specs. One site says it is "seen as the techies iPad" and "spec wipes the floor with Apple's iPad". Adam might not end up in everybody's hands; but if the company delivers what they have promised then they are going to make several people very happy.

Being liked in the developer community is a very good sign IMO.They seem to be savvy enough to recognize it as well. There will always be people who value functionality and flexibility. A good developer community around it will be very important.

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 17 Feb 2010 07:33

They should start approaching all the companies which make apps for iphone and get them to port their apps to the Adam and make a few new ones to boot.

They probably called it adam because adam ate the Apple in the bible. But I wish they would have given it an Indian sounding name. India could use the PR of some quality product (instead of shoddy crap) coming from its shores.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 21 Feb 2010 01:56

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/ ... ur%20India

"Why should Cloud vendors take India seriously? Here are some points:
1) India hasn't hit the saturation levels yet. Unlike Americas and EMEA, India and APAC have ample scope for IT adoption. This market has a huge, untapped potential at every level - Let that be enterprise, Public Sector or ITES.

2) India is a playground and a test bed to pilot strategic adoption techniques. No other geography will give the platform vendor access to the whole ecosystem. Want to engage with ISVs and excite them to develop on your platform? Well, India is the place to go. Do you need a mature developer community to pilot a SDK adoption plan? Want to setup a Center of Excellence to showcase the capabilities of your platform? Go, talk to Infosys or Wipro!

3) The Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) story is just warming up. Some of the inherent problems that India has been grappling with can now turn into a great opportunity for Cloud vendors. Think of how you can empower the clusters of small businesses through the Cloud and you have a winning story there."

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 21 Feb 2010 19:10

what's this Cloud computing all about? Sounds like a bunch of hype.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 22 Feb 2010 09:37

#1 Facebook
http://www.fastcompany.com/mic/2010/profile/facebook

BY Ellen McGirt
February 17, 2010
Photograph by Floto + Warner
It was quite a year for Mark Zuckerberg and crew, whose site added a whopping 200 million users. Now, as they brush off the crumbs of MySpace and other competitors, it's time to look for their next meal. They're very, very hungry.

The photos and updates began appearing on individual profiles, then popped up across interrelated news feeds: The first Facebook-staffer wedding had gone off without a hitch. Two beloved engineers, Ruchi Sanghvi and Aditya Agarwal, had arrived at Facebook as a couple in 2005 and survived the unique pressure of cranking out code for the hottest startup in the world. "They were a package deal," says Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. So, over what the company still calls its "Christmas break," Zuckerberg and more than a dozen past-and-present Facebook indispensables -- including now-departed cofounders Adam D'Angelo and Dustin Moskovitz -- trekked to a beach in Goa, India, for a week-long family celebration. Everyone dressed in costumed splendor; Zuckerberg looked fetching in a maroon silk sherwani. Women flashed henna tattoos. The groom arrived on horseback.
The elaborate Indian ceremony, a Bollywood spectacle with a big helping of Silicon Valley, presented a rare, vulnerable moment for the Facebook infrastructure -- one rogue wave could have taken out much of the site's brain trust. But it also offered a point of reflection for the crew. "All of us together, in that beautiful place," one attendee recalls. "We've come so far. Literally."

Vikas · Post by **Vikas** » 22 Feb 2010 14:14

^^ Waaaa, I was there for almost a year and yet no wedding for me

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 22 Feb 2010 20:24

what's this Cloud computing all about? Sounds like a bunch of hype.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

it means a service provider or corporate server farm hosts the IT infra and you run most of the heavyweight work and servers there, with desktops not having much of the application sw. in extreme form the desktop is a thin client which shows a virtual desktop rendered within the cloud itself and transported with necessary speed and security to wherever you may be. there are specialized protocols like PCoIP from Teradici to make this happen http://www.teradici.com/pcoip.php and strong players like citrix and wyse in the thin client space.

the cloud itself needs virtualization sw, strong networking and loads and loads of powerful servers run at least cost and high availability. amazon EC2 is a example of public cloud where a merchant may rent space and bandwidth
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

goes without saying all the "players" like netz, hp, ibm, dell, emc, netapps, vmware, xen(citrix) , brocade, force10, jnpr all like the "cloud" buzzword.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 22 Feb 2010 21:56

This is a new feature of google news

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/?source=news

It is good and can scan many websites without really going to that sites

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 22 Feb 2010 23:23

it means a service provider or corporate server farm hosts the IT infra and you run most of the heavyweight work and servers there

so basically server side processing.

again I fail to understand why all the hype.

application service provider concept has been around for a long time. did they just recently wake up to this idea or izzit just another marketing buzzword like extreme programming?

sinha · Post by **sinha** » 22 Feb 2010 23:31

Neshant wrote:application service provider concept has been around for a long time. did they just recently wake up to this idea or izzit just another marketing buzzword like extreme programming?

but then did you have an option for asking for and deploying a file based storage or a database server on the fly. or for that matter just provision a stack of Jboss/Mysql and deploy your custom app within minutes of needing and paying only for usage. IaaS and PaaS is different and so is the concept of elasticity and rapid agility.

SaaS == ASP of the past - but now you get control over lower layers as well.

negi · Post by **negi** » 23 Feb 2010 01:08

Concept of cloud is not new but 'what' will/can be encapsulated in a cloud will govern its utility for instance SFDC has been doing this for quite a while now nothing earth shattering but it allows small/medium cos to leverage the cloud concept and avoid costs with regards to setting up huge infra which HP/IBM or even EDS used to use to milk huge corps (they still do ).

I see why GD is happy , for with 'CLOUD' getting more and more hype and importance in high circles the likes of Netzilla and JNPR will have a huge role to play while the ones dominating the server market might have to rethink their strategy .

Btw long time back there were rumors about Oracle planning to acquire SFDC .

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 23 Feb 2010 03:25

Neshant wrote:what's this Cloud computing all about? Sounds like a bunch of hype.

Its not hype - problem is most people's understanding of it is 400% hot air and hence, you see the hype floating up. If used in proper specific ways, cloud computing is very useful. You already use aspects of it today without even knowing it. But then it is not the cure for cancer either, as Google and some others would have you believe coz we are not going back to the days of VT100 dumb terms with fancier displays.

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 23 Feb 2010 04:32

whenever i hear a hyped up explaination of what is essentially an old school technology, i get suspicious.

you get a lot of buzzwords being thrown around to dazzle the person :

Example :

This technology is leveraging a market leading intelligent service seamlessly orchestrating the delivery of next generation content and providing multiple dimensions for architecture extensibility and workflow based control on a flexible platform.

Basically a pan-wallah on the streets in India is doing that without knowing in his daily transactions. His flexible patform is his push cart, he's seamlessly orchestrating 10 people crowded around it and rolling pan at a fast/slow extensible rate. The next generation content is the radio you hear blaring on his push cart.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 23 Feb 2010 04:39

Cloud computing can be termed as a coming together/convergence of several old school technologies. In the end you will notice that most new technologies are rarely something fundamentally new.

Varoon Shekhar · Post by **Varoon Shekhar** » 23 Feb 2010 08:05

"Example :

This technology is leveraging a market leading intelligent service seamlessly orchestrating the delivery of next generation content and providing multiple dimensions for architecture extensibility and workflow based control on a flexible platform."

Hah-hah, LOL!

While on the subject of overawing computer jargon, here's an example of one:

What is a computer suffering from when it has a non-interactive, non-invasive, interface inversion?

It's not plugged in!

vera_k · Post by **vera_k** » 23 Feb 2010 11:31

Neshant wrote:so basically server side processing.

again I fail to understand why all the hype.

It's a new way to bill the user. There's two forces working to make this popular -

1. The industry vendors have long wanted to have predictable subscription based revenue streams like utilities do and

2. Users want to get away from ordering stuff that a) never gets used and b) causes periodic spikes in the outlay.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 23 Feb 2010 12:32

many medium/large cos would be happy run part of their apps on a cloud rental. stuff like payroll, HR, it support etc while keeping email and development servers internal. many small cos wouldnt want to have much IT infra.

salesforce.com has been cashing in on this trend.

suvod · Post by **suvod** » 24 Feb 2010 11:51

Can any of the Gurus on the forum give me an idea of salary ranges in the Biz Dev (Sales, Account Mgmt, Pre-Sales, etc.) function of Indian IT services companies for exp around 7/8 years?

Have posted this query in the careers thread too.

TIA
Suvo

suvod · Post by **suvod** » 24 Feb 2010 12:04

my take on Saas -

the transaction volume perspective: makes sense for applications that see a limited or fluctuating volume of transactions. also for applications which don't need too much customization. if we do a cost-benefit analysis of Saas (say for example salesforce.com in place of Oracle's Siebel as CRM solution) for a large company with large and steady volume of transactions, and one that would need a large amount of customization, it would not be worth it. Saas will be ideal for SMBs.

the investment perspective: Saas has less fixed cost and mostly transaction based marginal cost. thus is ideal for S/M businesses who cannot afford the typically prohibitive fixed cost investments required by enterprise apps like ERP or CRM.

Cloud is seeing a lot of traction in the consumer space, but not because of its benefits over traditional software, but merely because its provided for free. example Google Docs, Zoho in lieu of MS Office or any webmail.

It has a long way to go before it becomes a player in the enterprise/business segment. Only salesforce.com is somewhat of a success. Most of the hoopla in the press is hot air.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 24 Feb 2010 12:06

http://www.c-span.org/search.aspx?For=paul%20otellini
Check out what Itel chief talks about India. India is building infrastructure for 500m internet users.
He talks about Taiwan, SKorea, China etc

Intel Pres. & CEO Paul Otellini Remarks on Rebuilding America's Growth

The Brookings Institution in Washington hosted an event with Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. His topic was investment in the U.S. and a government partnership with business in promoting education, innovation and new business opportunities in order to maintain a globally competitive economy.

Varoon Shekhar · Post by **Varoon Shekhar** » 25 Feb 2010 03:42

http://getahead.rediff.com/report/2010/ ... istory.htm

'If we succeed, we will make history'
February 23, 2010 09:50 IST

With close to 20 years of experience in the microchip industry behind each one of them, these technology professionals chose not to settle down into a regular nine to five job instead they decided to let go of their comfortable paychecks and follow a dream: to make history.

The founder members, Parag Naik, (Chief technology officer, vice president, marketing and director), Vishwakumara Kayargadde, (Chief executive officer and managing director) Hemant Mallapur, (Vice president -- engineering and director) and Anindya Saha, (Director) came together in 2006 to start the Bangalore based start-up Saankhya Labs.

The idea that got them together was to create the world's first proprietary multi-standard TV demodulation technology -- a microchip used in TVs and set top boxes that extracts mpeg (moving pictures expert group: a standard for audio and video compression and transmission) data from the dish antenna/cable. What sets their version apart from existing ones is the fact that all other semi conductors need four different kinds of chips to address the different technologies in the world.

Saankya, however, has developed a single chip that will do the job.

Their contribution has already been recognised, within three short years of opening shop, in the form of two awards. In June 2009, Saankhya Labs won the 'Best Start-up' award at Silicon India's [ Images ] Start-up City 2009. And in February this year, they won the 'ISA Start-up to Watch Award" at Technovation 2010. And what's more, this isn't even their first business!

Parag, Vishwakumara and four others had got together in 2000 to start a company called Smart Yantra Technologies, which specialised in audio video streaming solutions. However, in 2004, the company was acquired by Genesis Microchip, and a couple of years later, Parag, Vishwakumara and Anindya quit along with their colleague, Hemant (who also had experience starting his own company before joining Genesis) to start another company on their own.

So why did they decide to quit lucrative jobs with Genesis and start their own company? "Well, once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur," says Parag.

"It becomes difficult to work for someone else once you have worked for yourself." However, Hemant had a different reason.

"For 17 years, I have been working for MNCs and learning about this industry. What I found was the sentiment that in India one cannot do the architecture, only the design. They (MNCs) would come up with ideas and India would implement them. I didn't agree with this, and had the confidence that we could build the product from concept. And then of course, I also had a latent ambition of becoming an entrepreneur."

Anindya agrees, "I have also worked in MNCs before, and wanted to do more innovative work. I agree with Hemant that Indians can innovate and have the skill to conceptualise and implement. We decided to take this step because we were sure we had the skill and know-how to build this technology."

In an interview with Insiyah Vahanvaty the co-founders of Saankhya Labs discuss the challenges they face as a start-up, their advice to budding entrepreneurs and their future plans.

Challenges they faced along the way

Getting a core team was a challenge because of the required skill set, and also the company needed funding which was a hurdle. They could not match the salaries that MNCs were offering.

"We found people working in MNCs who wanted to do something different. If we succeed, we'll make history. It's the thrill that brings us together, not the money. We had to handpick people we knew and wanted," explains Parag. "Convincing people was a task. We couldn't offer lavish salaries, only good work and dreams. We were lucky to get the team we have now. Incidentally, Sunil HR (Director -- software) and Abdul Aziz (Principal Architect Systems) were with us right from the beginning -- they co- founded Smart Yantra!"

"To raise money, we approached two investors we knew personally, who really helped us", continues Hemant. Also, chip making is a capital-intensive business. We are aiming to do it 10 times cheaper in India. Luckily, we have got visibility because of the awards we won. It took us 18 months to make the first prototype." finishes Anindya.

"Another problem was that all our customers are huge companies. So when we went to Japan [ Images ] with this idea, they looked down upon us. However, the second time we went, they were pleasantly surprised. So far, we have got two customers, to whom we will deliver by the end of the year. You become innovative when pushed against the wall," grins Parag.

Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs

"The journey is more important than the destination. Everyone has romantic dreams, but it's lot of hard work, sweat and blood. If you're prepared to rough it out, do it. That's why we decided to do it the second time. It's really thrilling", says Parag.

"In India there are lots of easy ways to make money. The economy is doing well and it is a cheap destination for oversees companies. But these companies limit your potential. I would say, go into product development -- the risk is higher, but so are the pay offs. You end up contributing to the country's GDP, so you're giving something back as well. We Indians need to get in the limelight ourselves -- not do all the work and let the credit go to someone else," declares Hemant.

"Our company is completely made in India but made for the world market. Young people need to start taking risks. However, it depends on their parents also -- the middle class value system doesn't allow for entrepreneurship. That change needs to come in. Then you'll start seeing a lot more start-ups, the way it is in China and US. Small countries like Taiwan have more technology companies than India," adds Anindya.

Future plans

We want Saankhya to grow and be successful. We want it to be a role model for engineers so they can try crazier ideas and make India grow. We want to see our chips in the majority of TVs in the world!

Ameet · Post by **Ameet** » 25 Feb 2010 22:17

Create a job, get a visa

http://blogs.forbes.com/velocity/2010/0 ... et-a-visa/

Senator John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, on Wednesday introduced legislation that would give green cards to immigrants who create new jobs.

The Startup Visa Act would give a two-year visa to an entrepreneur who can raise at least $250,000 for a new venture. If they create at least five full-time jobs, raise more than $1 million, or generate $1 million in sales within two years, they will get permanent legal status. The legislation's backers? More than 100 venture capitalists and angel investors.

manish · Post by **manish** » 26 Feb 2010 11:34

This article on NYT, brought back memories of an earlier discussion here by vina on Yech Pee's strategies. The article poses interesting questions - if the smartphones biz is going to be as big as they say it will be, what will be Yech Pee's fate?

H.P., Tech Powerhouse, Stumbles in Smartphones

Hewlett-Packard is one of the world’s most successful makers of desktop computers, laptops, servers and printers. It owns a powerful consumer brand, and it is a growing provider of services for businesses. In the first quarter, the company’s sales rose 8 percent.

But in smartphones, H.P. has been on a steady slide into irrelevance.

Sales of H.P.’s hand-held products, including its iPaq smartphone, dropped to $25 million in the quarter, down from $57 million in the same period last year. Apple, by contrast, had sales of $5.6 billion for iPhones and related products during its most recent quarter.

H.P.’s anemic performance in the smartphone market has left analysts perplexed. Globally, unit sales of smartphones are now running just about equal with laptops, and by 2012, smartphone sales are expected to eclipse the entire personal computer market.

The world’s largest computer maker is on the verge of missing the next great phase of the computing revolution.

What do the Gurulog think? vina and GD discussed the fight for supremacy between netz, IBM and Yech Pee - is that fight distracting them? Will Yech Pee continue to stay out of the handhelds market and go the way of say, IBM?

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 26 Feb 2010 13:53

manish wrote:
What to the Gurulog think? vina and GD discussed the fight for supremacy between netz, IBM and Yech Pee - is that fight distracting them? Will Yech Pee continue to stay out of the handhelds market and go the way of say, IBM?

Just came back from a mobile conf and panel discussion -
HP will buy a mobile company. The market is going to fragment more and older players are being irrelevant.
New companies will take the lead.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 26 Feb 2010 14:07

thailand also has some similar rule. you can start a business and employ a few local people to get residency. the owner of the motorboat we used was a british couple.

suvod · Post by **suvod** » 01 Mar 2010 18:08

Acharya wrote:
manish wrote:
What to the Gurulog think? vina and GD discussed the fight for supremacy between netz, IBM and Yech Pee - is that fight distracting them? Will Yech Pee continue to stay out of the handhelds market and go the way of say, IBM?
Just came back from a mobile conf and panel discussion -
HP will buy a mobile company. The market is going to fragment more and older players are being irrelevant.
New companies will take the lead.

Don't think so. Hardware manufacturers do not have any power in the market. The market will be dominated by companies that provide application platforms - Apple, RIM, Goog(Android) and maybe MS-Nokia if the alliance works out. This is simply because of the fact that smartphone users buy not because of the latest new feature, but the functionality of the device which is tightly related to the availability of apps.

Extending the argument, we should actually see a consolidation in the market. Same reason why you see HTC not being able to make a case for itself despite its phones having some of the best features. Its only hope is to tie up with Goog. I'm not sure what Moto can achieve with Droid or what Sony-Erricsson's future is. Players like Samsung or LG will play the mass-market price game to remain in the lower end of the market and give a hard time to Nokia, but don't know how profitable they can remain in the long-run, given their only play is on price.

This is just my honest opinion on the smartphone/hi-end phone market.

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 02 Mar 2010 10:38

what really does a person need all this mobile stuff for anyway.

when they can stream cable TV and movies for one very low flat yearly fee, then it will be worth something. till then its just a waste of time.

suvod · Post by **suvod** » 02 Mar 2010 14:17

Marten wrote:PS: Suvod, HTC was made big by Compaq. It started them off in handhelds and look at them now. They along with Foxconn do most of the ODM manufacturing for smart phones (Foxconn manufactures Ipods, Iphones etc along with the last seven HP handhelds/smart phones, Dell handhelds, Fujitsu handhelds). There were two more non-marginal ODMs, one of whom got absorbed by Foxconn and the other is still a small co. While the market may yet not have matured, the ODMs are the ones who will grow up the value chain.

I agree with you Marten, ODMs were all CDMs to start with and will move up the value chain. Which should bring them into potential conflicts of interest with the OEMs. That should be an interesting battle to follow.

My point is - HW manufacturers will always be there to do business, but the real power in the market will shift towards the app platforms.

BTW, do you happen to know how Flextronix is doing nowadays? As far as I can remember, they used to manufacture all the Palms till they tried to become an ODM. They were also selling their own designed phones to mobile carriers as private labels.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 03 Mar 2010 14:35

for some reason onlee americans or outsiders working in american shop seem to come up with good GUIs in SW and user experience which is a must to attract customers to costly products.

its not that the euros or japanese are inept - there are dozens of design studios and they make 1000s of interesting products like cars, machines, consumer electronics, food, furniture, clothing ....

but somehow in UI sher khan is able to come up better. chipanda/korea/japan(huge graphic design talent but compare sony-vs-apple)/finland/EU seems to always fall short even if backed up by strong HW. they take recourse to having design studios in sher khan but somehow the genes of the top management filters down there too.

Tanaji · Post by **Tanaji** » 03 Mar 2010 19:17

On the carrier side I think Acharya is correct. The market will definitely get more fragmented. The big telcos may not realize it but the age of Nokia, Ericcsson, AlcaLu is over and they will get rapidly sidelined. The practice of deploying custom hardware for big telco switches is coming to an end, and with it the monopoly that these companies.

The current trend is of using COTS (commercial off the shelf) platforms, on which you deploy your own software. Also more importantly, everyone is opening up their own interfaces. We witnessed that with the 3GPP standards and the practice is now becoming even more prevalent. Interfaces are increasingly standardized with open protocols. So, earlier when you had your core network exclusively of a single or 2 vendors or most, it is now composed of many vendors. Earlier if you had a Nortel PBX, it meant that you were forced to buy Nortel phones and the markups that came with it (ever looked into how much a phone cost? it was insane). Now, everyone uses SIP, you can use a third party SIP phone and plug into a PBX and its guaranteed to work... same with other devices.

This of course has some interesting effects:

Use of COTS means the telco can keep abreast of hardware development more rapidly and upgrade faster. It also is a license for the software developer to write inefficient code (though no one will admit it). If someone points to the development team at a telco, that his code is sucking up too much CPU, they respond with "So? we are recommending a Quad core now.. no problem!". Contrast this with the age of custom hardware where code was tweaked and re-tweaked to reclaim every last byte and CPU cycle
There are now more software releases, and telcos are becoming more of a software vendor with all the attendant ills. The age of "bulletproof code" is going away. Releases are no longer rigorously tested and crashes are more frequent. Telecom "5 9s" reliability is a thing of the past... even though MBA types come up with metrics to make it 5 9s.
Market becomes more fragmented. Open interfaces allow smaller niche players to sell their products to big carriers, with smaller margins. This also leads to interoperability issues on a massive scale: standards are open to interpretation and one vendors implementation of a RFC differs depending on the phase of the moon. Result: more headaches for the integrators

IMHO, the savings are just a chimera, you invariably lose out on any savings by the effort you spend on integrating and support... but then the MBA types have outsourced maintenance and support as well from the big carriers. I hear that in the UK there is a carrier called 3 that has outsourced almost everything in their operations department: drive tests, performance everything....

I think I need a career change.

manish · Post by **manish** » 03 Mar 2010 19:53

Tanaji wrote:
IMHO, the savings are just a chimera, you invariably lose out on any savings by the effort you spend on integrating and support... but then the MBA types have outsourced maintenance and support as well from the big carriers. I hear that in the UK there is a carrier called 3 that has outsourced almost everything in their operations department: drive tests, performance everything....

We have perhaps one of the best examples of an 'outsourced' carrier right here in India - Bharti Airtel. Outsourcing seems to have worked well for them, at least till now. With NSN, Ericsson and Huawei taking care of their entire gamut of network operations and management, the co's burden is reduced to making investment decisions and taking care of sales and marketing. IT and call centre ops seem to be handled by IBM. They merely hold the licenses to offer services and pay the the vendors to do everything else.

Seems to have worked well for them till now and they are replicating this model overseas as well.

Tanaji · Post by **Tanaji** » 03 Mar 2010 19:59

The logical extension to the above is to be a "virtual operator" ... buy a block of resources from the person who owns the network and market it under your own name. Again, we have the UK to turn to: there seem to be a few operators that way : ASDA, Tesco etc... they dont own anything, they just buy blocks from the main carriers.

manish · Post by **manish** » 03 Mar 2010 22:38

Tanaji wrote:The logical extension to the above is to be a "virtual operator" ... buy a block of resources from the person who owns the network and market it under your own name. Again, we have the UK to turn to: there seem to be a few operators that way : ASDA, Tesco etc... they dont own anything, they just buy blocks from the main carriers.

Agreed sir, the so-called MVNOs would seem to be the logical next step.

Interesting thing to note here is that despite the outsourced model being successful in the Indian telco scene, the MVNO attempts flopped. Virgin Mobile, perhaps the world's first and the best known MVNO, couldn't do much in the Indian market over the past couple of years, and I have heard from people that they were on the verge of folding up last year. They were piggybacking their services on Tata Teleservices network, offering CDMA services.

The reasons for failure are debatable. First, there is some issue with the regulators not allowing MVNOs to operate legally in India. AFAIK, Virgin exploited some loophole to stay alive after other operators complained to GoI. They categorically state that they are NOT an MVNO in India.

Secondly, the early choice of CDMA perhaps limited their appeal in one single stroke - now with Tata getting on the GSM bandwagon, I see that they are offering GSM as well.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 09 Mar 2010 22:31

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/c ... 433787.htm

India's Next Outsourcing Wave
To modernize after its crisis, the U.S. financial industry needs help from India's IT outsourcers more than ever, says Sudhakar Ram

By Sudhakar Ram

It's understandable that many in the U.S. are angry that workers lose jobs to offshore programmers. Despite the unpopularity of outsourcing in the wake of the financial meltdown, I am convinced that "Third Wave" Indian IT players—those outsourcing specialists that U.S. companies can rely on as strategic partners for high-end work—can help prevent future disasters. IT companies around the world have a huge opportunity to collaborate and join forces in the next few years.

Robert
Mar 9, 2010 4:24 PM GMT
In a world of multinational corporations it's quixotic for a nation state such as the United States to pursue Buy American policies. On the other hand, everytime someone such as Mr. Ram says Americans can't meet the requirements to modernize IT in our own financial services industry it angers me. There appear to be many Americans with IT credentials who can't get hired - while work is outsourced to India! I don't care if Mr. Ram's company makes profits in the United States - just make sure the labor done for American IT modernization is done in the USA.