Nominum plans expansion in Indian telecom market

Telecom Lead Asia: Nominum, a provider of network-based service delivery platform for mobile operators, is set to expand in India.

Nominum’s newly appointed country manager Umesh Jamwal says its expansion is in line with the growth in Indian telecom market. Excerpts of the online interview:

On expansion plans in India

India is on the brink of a revolutionary level of telecom expansion. We are seeing the level of investment we saw from our key marquee customers, like NTT, Verizon, BT and Telstra, about five to seven years ago when we they implementing  our world-regarded core DNS and DHCP platforms.

The drivers for the first level of “core engines” investment was based on the security, scalability, high availability, high performance/low latency and key visibility of the DNS at the application level. At Nominum we have been providing and expanding these feature sets for over ten years. The pan India wireless networking expansions that are planned to occur during the next three years will require this same “enhanced” DNS/DHCP platforms, and with the massive scale issues these deployments and networks will face the Nominum core engine technology is a hand in glove value proposition.

The next major wave of network-level expansion is what will define the Internet experience of the future. Nominum’s N2 platform enables communication service providers to deploy rapidly, and cost effectively premium services that enhance user experience, and offer next generation network safety. For CSPs, these services provide immediate new revenue streams and strip out legacy costs of operation. We believe this expansion is just starting to happen now.

Your main operator clients

Our current Indian customers are Idea Cellular, Bharti Airtel and Tikona, and their technical and commercial teams should be recognized for their vision and prowess.

On business opportunities and challenges in India

The most significant opportunity in India is participating in programs that will change the face of the socio-economic landscape of what India is today – these new high powered networks will provide unheard of access to everything from education, healthcare, banking and government services. This will be a game changer for India. The scale of end users that must be supported by these networks and core platforms is a clear and present area of opportunity for Nominum. The ability for Indian network service providers to skip a generation of inflexible and expensive legacy built applications and leverage brand new Nominum N2 technology is also a clear and present opportunity as well.

The Indian market also presents significant challenges. The lower ARPU India service providers must work with translates to a need for more effective investments by our customers and more supportive and flexible vendor responses from companies like Nominum. We now have over four years commercial and technical experience working within the Indian market so our own investment in expansion is not made without a good foundation of knowledge of these challenges.

Nominum boasts an extensive customer list of the World’s largest carrier service providers and a highly unique and talented engineering team, while BIND 9 is a freeware model with the expected limitations. One of the problems with BIND 9 is that is unable to deliver on the requirements of a 4G LTE world. This becomes particularly important as CSPs are forced to re-define a customer experience that is richer, faster and safer.

On pricing demands from Indian operators

All operators are going to renegotiate telecom infrastructure deals to reduce Capex and Opex.

Meeting the challenges that Indian network service providers face are already a function of our business model.– There are two strings to this bow that Nominum supports:

* Flexibility in the commercial structuring of our licensing models.

* The ability to provide clear and present vale in the form of new revenues and cost savings via the N2 platform.

Your new products in the pipeline

I can’t discuss specific products, but I can elaborate on the company’s N2 platform and its future focus.  The applications we have under development will be instrumental in the migration network services provides in India must take to maintain ARPU sustainability, market service competitiveness and operational efficiencies as the market continues to be challenged with OTT services and commoditization of access revenues.

We are excited about the opportunity in India to work with CSPs to define the new customer experience.

Baburajan K
[email protected]