Today was our first day at the new office. We moved from Rangreth (airport/industrial area) to Soura (nearer the town). Our older location, Rangreth, was chosen by the govt to be the location for incubating ICT business units in Kashmir back in 2001. We set up our shop there in 2002. Luckily, there are more beautiful locations throughout the valley to drive some inspiration home. Our new location, Upper Soura, beats Rangreth hands down in beauty and culture.

While Rangreth is increasingly becoming a factory area, Soura is dominated by pure nature all around. The best thing for me is the magical refreshing water. No need to drink bottled water anymore. It reaches us after hundreds of miles of natural tossing and turning around rugged rocks. The source being one of the tributaries of river Indus, the river that gives India its name. The tributary lands into a lake barely 300 meters from our new office. Lake Anchar (a Persian name referring to the four caliphs) is the only blue water lake in the main valley.

Anchar lake lies towards our right while on the left the landscape is dominated by the backdrop of Mount Mahadev, a mountain I attempted to climb when at the high school (we were driven back by a snowstorm).

So nature was one of the main motivations for moving to Soura. There are other pluses as well. Soura is a civilian area while Rangreth and the surrounding airport area is dominated by the military bases. Soura locality is truly indicative of local culture. It is a diversified sub-urban community that has accepted people from all parts of the valley over the last four decades. The new office location is 10 minutes drive from downtown Srinagar, an area that has traditionally been at the centre of all things important to Kashmir.

From all the nature and stuff, a happy new year to all our readers!!

Breaking the silence of 40 long days today, a silence protesting the ugly 8 long years of telcom recession. That is one reason. The other reason is that I have been working on some custom research projects while you guys were watching the markets throw those familiar tantrums. Anyway, the blogging will be light for the next few months, but we will have a full-time blogger for you sometime in December. I have not recruited for over a year now. In India, that means attenuation to the tune of 50%. Almost an organized attrition. And that is a killer especially if you have to do the baby sitting while they stay!!!

Some comments on the major developments over the past month or so:

US elections: Easier to say things when you are out of power. The moment you assume it, you get a microscopic view of things you were previously seeing with your naked eye. Anyway, as long as the US produces innovation, there should not be a major problem. In the context of communications industry, the problem is to monetize that innovation. In ICT, some new and equally competitive pockets of innovation are opening up - areas like Eastern Europe and Ireland. I would probe the BRIC countries next.

The financial crisis: not quite Correction 2.0. However, I wish the VC model would implement some longer term correction. There is at times excessive optimism among the young entrepreneurs about their business plans (in the ICT industry). The VC model of nineties has also cultivated the culture of ‘let us work ridiculously hard for 18 months and then market ourselves as an acquisition target’. That sort of culture just defeats sustainable entrepreneurship. I wish that could go away. Other than that I think the financial crisis of Oct 08 could precipitate something that has been cooking over the last few years. A couple of telecom giants will fall. Their places will be taken by Huawei and ZTE. Open Source could gain importance in communications. I wish the landline could make some sort of a comeback with the fiber deployments. I can’t stand Internet over wireless, especially time sensitive apps. The crisis has also been conveniently used by some companies to do layoffs.

Continue reading "Breaking the 40 day silence" »

I have been reduced to dial-up internet for over 10 days now, which is one of the reasons why I have not blogged. Can’t stand the dial-up speed anymore.

We have been unable to reach our office for the last two weeks due to Agitation 2.0 here in Kashmir. In the meantime, my home broadband connection was messed up by my service provider BSNL. For the second time they changed my username/password without any prior information. Indeed the idiots do not deem me worthy of any correspondence on the matter. Since customer service does not exist, I called an ‘insider’ who informed me about this change. Apparently the local exchange has to make an adjustment locally in order to give effect to the change in the central server. The local exchange employees, however, have not been able to report to work due to curfews and renewed vigour in protests/hartals. As a result, I have been demoted down to dial-up.

Continue reading "Dial-up in the time of cholera" »

With reference to analyst relations:

1. Make an effort to understand the technology your clients develop, and the ecosystem around the company product. This is the most important tip.

2. Get one-para quotes from your clients on major industry developments so that an analyst knows the overall stance of your client on the subject. This could sometimes result in a phone briefing.

3. Get the photos of products / diagrams / senior management on something like Flickr. Make sure there is a good variety available.

4. Turn white papers into short video presentations. I would rather go through a short video describing a company’s position than download a pdf (and print it, and then read it). For now, videos might be watched by fewer. But they stick. If you want to continue with the pdf white papers you can now include Flash in pdf files. So perhaps some video content could be added inside these pdf files.

Continue reading "10 tips for PR folks" »

So we got the video bug too! We had originally planned to make short documentaries on various topics relevant to us. But I don’t think we have the resources just yet to embark on such ambitious projects. So we will instead be posting these near-uncut video interviews. The Q&A video interview series kicks off with discussion on carrier choices with regard to EPON and GPON. I am interviewing Yukihiro Fujimoto, Head Supervisor, Optical Access Systems Project, NTT. There is some background noise and the volume might not be adequate. I am afraid that is the sort of presentation you will have to put up with for some time till we get our technical person to acquire some video editing skills. And depending upon how you like the content, we are willing to improve presentation for sure. One thing I would request however: It is not feasible to travel all the time for these interviews. If some of you would be willing to do these things off the webcam that would keep the video content going. Thanks. JR

The search continues .... The prospect we discuss today is Bangalore based Tejas Networks. Since 2000, when Tejas Networks was established, the vendor has generated accumulated business worth $54 million till the end of year 2006. By the end of 2007, that figure is expected to reach around $100 million. Tejas provides next generation SDH as well as switched SDH solutions and has been witnessing YoY growth in the range of 70-90%.

Tejas has so far raised about $59 million in venture funding.

The solution set spans all three areas of optical networking – core, metro and access. However, the primary focus of the company remains the transmission side. Optical networking equipment market in India has two main contenders: ECI and Tejas. Together these two command around 50% of the market. There are some 7 or 8 other vendors which share the other half of this equipment market. Tejas boasts of nearly all the leading Tier 1 operator customers in India, which include MTNL, BSNL and Bharti Airtel.

Continue reading "In search of India’s Cisco, Part 2: Tejas Networks" »

Just thinking what Google’s OpenSocial could lead to. If there are common APIs then I guess one voice softclient fits all. If an ASP’s VoIP softclient works with Orkut, it will work with XING, MySpace, LinkedIn … the whole lot. You are therefore likely to see a bunch of voice clients being offered as options on these sites but one or two being promoted actively. That gives social networking companies more power because they can have a bigger say in who they promote and make serious money in the process. So expect eBay to keep spending on Skype for a while.

Standardization of APIs will lead to commoditization. Apart from seeing guys like Facebook in ETSI working group meetings, features available on social networking sites will become commoditized. One of those features will be voice. This will no doubt result in more robust and off-the-shelf social networking software platform available out there that comes pre integrated with telecom applications. So will the likes of Sylantro and Broadsoft start developing social networking features or will they just opt for partnerships with some developers? Well, either one of the options will do. But they are likely to respond quick.

Continue reading "What OpenSocial could mean for voice" »

The search continues. Here is the ITI profile. ITI had revenues of Rs. 18.2 billion (approx US$455 million) for the fiscal year 2006-07. Net loss amounted to Rs. 4 billion (approx US$100 million) for the period. Below are some more details.

• The last time ITI was profitable was in fiscal 2001-02. Since then it has incurred a loss every year.

• Out of the $455 million revenue for 2006-07, BSNL the incumbent accounted for about 84%

• The main revenue driver for ITI is wireless. Here are the percentage contributions out of the overall revenue: GSM infrastructure 24%, GSM BTS 11%, WLL 19%.

• NGN deployments generated around $13.25 million in revenues during the fiscal

Continue reading "In search for India’s Cisco: ITI" »

I shocked an Indian audience at a tech conference recently. I told them no Indian company was among the market leaders in any of the emerging or established telecom equipment segments. And that most telecom software development in India was limited to outsourcing. One learned government official present at the conference was clearly disappointed. In his closing remarks he pointed out the reason for that: “Maybe it is due to the fact that our companies do not have the marketing dollars to market their products.”

That is actually not a valid reason. I agree that technology companies in India are not Press Release driven. But the underlying assumption that there is a lot of good technology coming from India is hype. In telecoms there is very little innovation going on. There is huge demand for core infrastructure products within the country. And there are not domestic Ciscos and Huaweis. Local outfits like ITI and C-DoT are usually content with localizing core infrastructure products from overseas suppliers. Those are the two that come to mind. There was also Hughes Software Systems that got acquired by Flextronics. The other ones would be smaller outfits like OnMobile and Tejas that are focused on certain niche segments.

Continue reading "In search of India’s Cisco" »

Healthcare as an industry lacks good communication system. The way healthcare is practiced is that most of the workers in the hospital are mobile. Very few have desktop phone number or a desktop where they can get email. They are moving about the hospital and they have critical business reasons to reach one another many times each day. They have been looking for an appropriate communications system for decades. They have not really found it.

Continue reading "Communication system for healthcare industry" »

Just came across this post on GigaOm about Skype teaming up with SpinVox. I looked at SpinVox when I was trying to find a solution to the following problem: How do you get the thoughts of those people published on the net who talk rather than write? SpinVox has a blogging solution that lets you dial a number and leave your message. The message is then converted by SpinVox solution into text and sent to your blog page.

Using speech recognition to get the talkers to publish their thoughts is definitely one of the cost effective ways to achieve this. But speech recongition cannot transcribe words correctly, certainly not long speeches. I digged a little deeper into possible soltuions for this imminent Internet service, and came very close to submitting a business plan to Sequoia. I will on Saturday share some of the notes I made in the process. I think talkers deserve to be publsihed just as bloggers do.

Over the past few months, I have been wondering why the perceived value of our email newsletter has dwindled. Along with our research reports, we have been updating over 8,000 newsletter subscribers with market analysis (mainly VoIP) on a weekly basis. We never doubted the quality of content in the newsletter. Yet the number of subscriptions has remained almost stagnant over the last 18 months.

We have come to two main conclusions: (1) Email subscriptions (although reader solicited in our case) are giving way to syndicated feeds, and (2) Market research companies such as iLocus should not interfere in the domain that is better served by the media and qualified bloggers i.e. readers do not expect us to report on an announcement made by companies, or even provide comment/analysis on a press announcement. I think media sources such as Light Reading and blog sites such as GigaOm do that job exceptionally well.

Continue reading "Market research bites / blog" »