THE FAST PACED MOBILE VALUE ADDED SERVICES MARKET IN INDIA
M2MAPPS: Can you give us a small brief on TeleDNA’s activities in the Indian market?
UDIT SHANKER: TeleDNA has been forerunner in the field of Innovation and cutting edge telecom VAS products. TeleDNA has pioneered products like, Messaging Solutions, Data products, Cell Broadcast services & Location based applications. TeleDNA is creating future ready solutions on Enterprise mobile applications and aims to become the market leaders in this domain.
M2MAPPS: What are the areas that TeleDNA VAS perceives as its most promising?
UDIT SHANKER: In today’s market scenario, with ARPU is dropping and the regulation not being business friendly, we need to look at reducing the operational cost and increase the efficiency of the operators. One of TeleDNA initiative in this area has been TVAIO (TeleDNA VAS All In One), where have engineered multiple messaging products in one rack. This reduces the footprint and provides more control, ease for the operator to manage the services. Another most promising strategy has been to outsource most of the operator VAS elements management to VAS vendors; this ensures better management of the services and effective revenue enhancement.
M2MAPPS: How TeleDNA’s M2M Platform drive change in the Mobile VAS ecosystem?
UDIT SHANKER: The advances in network technology, specifically, 3G and 4G/LTE has thrown open a huge opportunity for utilizing the increased bandwidth for business applications. With advances in consumer device technology making them cheaper and widely available, the Machine-to-Machine applications and services are poised to harness the higher bandwidth availability from 3G/4G/LTE networks. This development will increase the penetration of M2M applications and Telecom operators also would want to encourage and play a key role in the M2M ecosystem to monetize the 4G/LTE infrastructure. The need of the hour is to enable an efficient service delivery ecosystem that will achieve the following: Facilitate shorter concept-to-market timeframe for M2M applications and services, reduced capital/operational expense and improved margins for all players in the ecosystem TeleDNA M2M Platform has been built with Open interfaces based on Service Oriented Framework architecture and the platform is built with prebuilt and tested components that are essentially called “Building blocks” and these building blocks provide rapid development and deployment of scalable and extensible M2M Applications. Benefits for Telecom operators: Monetize the network technology investments by offering innovative M2M applications and services quickly and in a cost effective manner. Ability to attract M2M application developers and application service providers with TeleDNA’s M2M Platform that can support diverse types of devices, network technologies, rich suite of applications and operational services. Benefits for M2M Application Developers and Providers: Cost and time from concept to market is reduced. Access to development SDK, building blocks and ready to use applications brings down the application development time and cost significantly. Need to focus only on application logic – the rest – infrastructure, devices, network and Service life-cycle management functions are taken care of by TeleDNA’s M2M Platform. Staging Server to test and deploy applications
M2MAPPS: Can you explain how TeleDNA mZone works?
UDIT SHANKER: mZone Plus – Social Media and Infotainment TeleDNA mZone is a Social Media and Infotainment web Application targeted for Internet and Mobile Users. It has all what it takes to be a WEB 2.0 based Social Media and Infotainment Web Application. TeleDNA mZone is one stop shop for all the social activities with different social networking sites like Face book, Twitter, My Space, Linked In etc. It is a Highly Scalable and High Available System with interfaces towards SMSC, Mail Servers, Ad Servers, Payment Gateways and Social Networking Sites. The key features of the application are: Friend Connections PADing Photo Albums Messaging Loyalty Points and Redemption Contest and Win Info Zones (Food, Events, Travel, Dating, Movies, Students, Jobs, and Classifieds etc.)
M2MAPPS: What are the challenges in the way of m2m penetration in the Indian market?
UDIT SHANKER: The major challenges faced by the key players in the M2M ecosystem are primarily related to time to market these services and the cost of providing M2M applications and services to the subscribers. Telecom Operators: Management of M2M applications and services across the players and the systems in the ecosystem is disjoint. Need to support a diverse set of networks, devices and business work flow management functions cost effectively. Long concept-to-market timeframe impacting business revenue and decisions. Content Providers and Application Service Providers: High hardware, software and licensing cost to use M2M application framework and building blocks in order to build and offer newer applications and services. High hardware, software and licensing cost to support BSS/OSS functions for applications and services with Telecom operator or delivery channel provider. Long concept-to-market timeframe impacting the competitiveness and viability of small and medium businesses.