Positioning Network As The Platform For New Collaboration

Ajay Goel recently joined Cisco as the senior vice president-IT Services, India & SAARC. In an interview with Biztech 2, Goel discusses the major challenges and emerging trends in the IT services industry in India.

How is Cisco providing support to the growing needs of the Indian IT services industry?

The BPO/ITeS market is a high growth segment with a strong dependence on robust, multifaceted, scalable, expandable and secure network infrastructure to fulfill its business objectives. The sector’s high dependence on networks makes it a key segment for Cisco in India. Cisco’s prominence as a vendor in the ITS space is constantly growing as the ITeS and BPO industries move towards IP based next generation core networks and the Indian and MNC IT services and software companies expand their presence in India.

Cisco’s solutions enable a secure infrastructure, thereby enhancing productivity for Indian ITS companies. ITS as a vertical is unique to India. Verticalisation has helped Cisco build domain expertise. Since the ITS sector has unique needs, the verticalisation strategy has allowed Cisco to focus on fulfilling these requirements as well as incorporating best practices across its clients.

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What are the major challenges faced by Cisco while supporting the IT services industry in India?

With the ITS industry adding over 3 million graduates to their workforce annually, enhancing employee productivity and controlling attrition remain the top priorities for the industry. Cisco solutions enable ITS companies to achieve profitable growth by increasing workforce productivity.

Since the industry is booming, there is also a need to upgrade technology at a rapid pace. The need for BPO providers to have state-of-the-art network infrastructure is a cause of concern in terms of the pressures it puts on the organisation’s capital expenditure. As a result, Cisco Capital has worked out leasing and financing options to allow their BPO customers the flexibility of upgrading their technologies frequently, as required.

Could you enumerate some of the emerging trends in this industry?

While the initial focus of the industry was on building a strong and reliable backbone and using technology as a selling point, today BPOs are increasingly using technology infrastructure as a differentiator highlighting better QoS and hence, better delivery. Prospective customers evaluate a delivery centre’s maturity making it imperative for BPOs to spruce up their applications and networking infrastructure.

Customers dictate technology investments in the BPO business. Most centres therefore offer state-of-the-art technology, on par with the most advanced centres in the world. The ITS sector is therefore a keen adopter of advanced networking solutions.

What is going to be your fist initiative towards the industry as soon as you join any important POA for this year?

My focus will be on driving Cisco’s mission i.e. to position ‘Network As The Platform for new collaboration, consolidation and services creation’. Our ITS strategy will be to improve business agility and efficiency, improve productivity per employee and also help our customers transform their global business models by creating Networked Virtual Organisations.

Where do you see the industry heading in the next five years and what are Cisco’s plans?

With Cisco’s opportunity to provide end-to-end solutions, Cisco is best placed to fulfill the requirements of the BPO industry. Cisco believes in constantly understanding customer needs, and has put in place the right organisation along with products, support and services to make BPO/ITeS customers look to Cisco for all their network infrastructure needs. By virtue of Cisco’s association with the industry’s largest BPO/ITeS companies in India, its track record of consistently meeting customer expectations, BPO/ITeS customers consider Cisco their vendor of choice for network infrastructure.

Our focus areas going forward will be energising Foundation Technologies like Routing, LAN Switching, WAN Switching and Leapfrog Advanced Technologies like Unified Communication, Security and Wireless.