Managed Services in Telecom industry: 4.2 Billion $ business opportunity

Two days Ago we posted about the upcoming 2nd Managed Services Event in Delhi based on telecom expense management who started today with Presence of Major Telecom Deligates. Inaugurated by Shri PJ Thomas, IAS, , secratery, DOT, Ministry of Communications India Managed services in Telecom is expected to be a 4.2 billion dollar business opportunity by 2014, according to  experts at a conference on the subject here.  Department of Telecom Secretary P. J. Thomas said Managed Services was emerging as a new science. “This is a great development in the great telecom story” he added inaugurating the event.

“Telecom sells like fish” but the operators have found that it is more cost beneficial to employ fishermen to catch the fish and for them to focus on marketing it,  said Bharti Airtel senior VP for Networks Shyam Prabhakar Mardikar.

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Setting the road ahead for the new growth industry of managed services,  Comviva CEO Manoranjan Mohapatra  claimed that India “is the pioneer in manages services in telecom”.  This new opportunity was largest in network, then in IT and yet to grow in value added services even where alone it would rise to 400 million dollar business by 2014, the Comviva chief executive  predicted.  As the number of operators was crowding into the telecom service operation, service differentiation was becoming critical while value added services, a complex area of management was promising the maximum addition of revenue growth.  Interdependency  of VAS applications was set to form a service.

Describing managed services as an “end to end partnership”  between the service operator and the many entities managing their side of the entire service, Vikas Arya,  network operations director of Sistema Shyam Teleservices suggested operators should take to “creating modeling” and “thinking outside the box” to overcome the enormous problems of integrating the work of these different partners.

Telecom customers doubled in the last two years from 300 million to 600 million but the average revenue per user has exactly halved from Rs 280 to Rs 140.  So the operators of the telecom service are making the same amount of money as before despite the doubling of the customer base. This “is the great growth paradox in telecom” and the focus now was on breaking through the constant level of 400 minutes per user,  as the operators wrestle with fast changing technology and explosive scale of growth of network connectivity and look to rural expansion as the next big step for them.