"There's Adequate Growth In IP Telephony"

Anil Nair, president, Avaya Global Connect talks to Biztech2 about the emergence of IP telephony and shares his views about the current regulatory norms that govern its usage in the country.

As a vendor, are you satisfied with the way IP telephony has progressed in India?

Well, whether it’s IP or TDM, telephony is telephony. However, if we look at it, nobody today invests in TDM technologies anymore. Pretty much all the R&D investments are directed towards IP based communications. This is simply because IP enables a lot of things for customers and they derive many benefits that traditional telephony doesn’t offer them. For instance with IP, customers can deploy the intelligence at one location and the end-points at a number of geographical locations. They can scale up operations in a very short time span, bring in the changes to their communication infrastructure at a much quicker pace, something that has always been missing with traditional telephony.

There are tangible benefits of adopting IP communications. It can help enterprises reduce administrative expenses, boost productivity and extract measurable return on their infrastructure investments. Businesses, especially in the services segment such IT/ ITeS, telcos, BPOs etc can benefit greatly by IP.

As long as the economy continues to grow and with it the required infrastructure, I believe there’s going to be adequate growth for IP communications in the country.

Don’t you think that it would have been better had there been a more amiable regulatory environment for IP telephony in the country?

Yes, I think we could have done better with a more accommodating regulatory environment. The regulations today are forcing our enterprises to make higher investments in communication infrastructure than their competing counterparts in different geographies. For instance if I was sitting in the US, there’d be only one phone with which would’ve allowed me to make calls internally as well as connect to the outside public telephone network. But here in India I have to have two separate phones because the regulations demand that PSTN and the VoIP infrastructures remain separated.

In case of the BPO industry, which is a highly competitive space, India based call centres have to buy additional infrastructure as a result of such norms. The current norms are making our businesses loose their competitive edge. So to that extent the regulatory mandates need to be more realistic; they need to keep pace with the changing technologies and newer business environments.

Here there is a clear gap between the understanding of technology and the rules that govern its usage. The regulations clearly lag behind.

How do these issues affect you as a vendor?

Here’s the thing, if at the end of the day our customers do well, we do well. So if there’s something that’s hindering our customer’s growth and reducing its competitive edge, it is bound to affect our business as well. Regulations seem to be a definite hurdle in the way of adoption.

In addition to this, when it comes to regulations, there are different interpretations and grey areas. For instance the authorities always try to establish if the rules and policies are being complied with or not and who did what?

This tends to complicate matters and you needlessly get into spaces of controversy which are nothing more than a waste of time.

Lately there’s been a lot of talk around standardisation and interoperability. What are your thoughts on that?

I think that aspiration has always been there. Even when TDM was prevalent, different vendors did get together and tried to accommodate interoperability through standardisation. I think that with IP we are moving in that direction much faster today than before.

Avaya as a company has always tried to create solutions that are designed with standards-based technologies and open architecture so that they can work across the entire communications networks and with devices from other vendors.

Generally speaking, solutions vendors have realised that in order to foster adoption, they will need to develop standards based offerings and I think we are moving towards a situation where equipments and systems from multiple vendors will be able to co-exist in an enterprise environment.