Succeeding in the New World

It is well accepted today that many of the global economies are facing a slowdown. The
combined effect of the mortgage crisis, energy prices and consequent meltdown of Wall Street
has taken its toll on even the resilient economies of China and India. The financial services
industry is worst hit; other sectors including IT, auto and retail are also on the downturn.

To beat a recession, companies must

manage through it with minimal injury,
Innovate
usually through cost cutting. However,
it is also a time to emerge stronger for
the morning after, by growing into new
markets, strengthening supply chains
and developing innovative business
`
models. Whatever be the strategic
objective, communications
technologies and services can play a
critical role in helping corporations
navigate through the uncertain times as Collaborate Conserve
well as prepare them for tomorrow.

Conserve: Traditionally, businesses

have focused on cost reduction during
a recession, usually, by going after G&A and marketing costs. Global expansion and
collaboration do add new administrative and marketing costs and create a situation where
businesses have to find new avenues of improving profitability. There is also a need to be
increasingly conscious of the impact of business activities on the environment; conserving energy
and carbon emissions, along with costs, is the primary mantra in current times. The emergence of
hosted or managed services for communications services and applications enables businesses to
expand their capabilities without many of the associated costs and overheads.

Enterprise applications including ERP, messaging, and security offered by service providers
ensure that all stakeholders can have a seamless experience, irrespective of location and access
mechanism. Managed services like messaging and security, not only reduce operating costs but
also free up valuable capital resources. The managed services model creates greater focus on core,
market-facing business strategies and processes by letting specialist service providers manage the
non-core activities. Similarly, data center consolidation and outsourcing can provide major
savings through scale of real-estate, power and management. Further, virtualization provides
‘multiplier’ savings in terms of capex utilization, flexibility, power efficiency, disaster recovery
efficiency, etc.

There are also several customized “cloud” services to address the demands of specific industry
verticals. For instance, hosted contact centers enable mid-sized BPOs to scale their operations
with limited up-front capex and pay as they expand their business. Services like public
Telepresence rooms, in addition to their power of collaboration, provide considerable savings in
cost, eliminating travel and other associated expenses as well as providing other intangible
savings in carbon emissions and employee productivity.
Collaborate: Developing countries, growing at over 8.6% p.a. over the next five years, provide
significant new market opportunities for large corporations that face demand saturation in the
developed countries. This rapid growth in addition to the fact that 80% of global population will
be in the emerging economies, makes these markets a must-enter for most multi-nationals. Global
expansion will result in globally distributed teams based on the availability of best resources to
run global businesses. Supply chains, downstream and upstream, tend to be spread across
countries but need to work seamlessly as an integrated, virtual unit. Managing people across
locations and building a shared organization culture is the biggest challenge for companies in this
new world. Moreover, it is critical that companies create real-time collaboration mechanisms
across the extended organization for the creation of new products / services and taking them to
market ahead of competition.

Global Virtual Private Networks (VPN) using MPLS and Global Ethernet solutions enable the
creation of secure, multi-location wide area networks with high levels of scalability and flexibility.
Bringing new offices online or increasing bandwidth between them or implementing a new
application globally has become almost as simple as installation of a plug and play device.

Additionally, businesses can choose

from a variety of platforms, including
high definition video conferencing
(Telepresence), next-generation
content delivery networks and
converged services, to engage more
effectively and in real-time with their
stakeholders. It could be a BPO that
wants its engagement managers to
brief their clients in North America
and Europe using Telepresence, face
to face every week instead of waiting
for the monthly on-site reviews; it
could be a fashion products company
that uses a content delivery network to provide web-based, video training to its sales teams and
agents across Asia the day prior to launch of its next best-seller. It could also be any company
whose leadership and management teams use unified communications systems to engage and
work as a single team, across multiple priorities, geographies and time-zones.

Innovate: It took the “telephone” nearly hundred years to become a globally adopted and
mainstream product. Today, new services and products are launched in days and reach the peak
of their life-cycle in just months. The rapid shortening of the consumer adoption cycles creates
new opportunities and challenges. The willingness of customers to try and accept new products
(and providers) enables companies to enter new markets and challenge incumbents. On the flip
side, companies now have very short time-windows to launch services and recoup their
investments, before an alternate product comes along or consumer preferences change.
Simultaneously, the saturation of traditional markets is forcing businesses to identify new
segments that were hitherto untapped or were not suitably targeted. This also requires the
identification and adoption of new and/or more appropriate channels that can create the time, cost
and focus advantage of reaching a market. The Internet has been at the heart of most innovations
in recent years; it continues to be so, particularly with the re-invention of the www as Web2.0.
High bandwidth backbone and access networks and huge cost effective storage are providing the
impetus for digitization and online distribution of most forms of content and information.
Education – knowledge management and training, in the corporate context – can now be
disseminated in a highly interactive and customized manner, across multiple locations using IP-
based training and conferencing solutions. Content providers can reach their customers much
faster; for instance, an online gaming company with an appropriate CDN solution can deliver new
games 4X to 10X times faster than without.

Voice and basic data communication enabled the first wave of outsourcing – contact centers and
transaction processing; with advanced video communications facilities, BPOs can create now
seek to outsource activities that require intense, face to face interaction and collaborative
knowledge sharing. Wireless and mobile technologies have also helped expand the reach of
services to markets that were earlier out of bounds. Banks, particularly in emerging markets, can
now use mobile ATMs with wireless connectivity to open up whole new, untapped rural markets
for financial services.

Businesses have a variety of choices, both in terms of services and service providers. A
communications service provider can be more than just a vendor. In the context of the shift to
managed and hosted services, the communications provider should be one that has domain
expertise and can provide customized business solutions rather than just network connectivity or
infrastructure. In these times of uncertainty, it is also important for IT managers to partner with
service providers that are financially robust. There are only a handful of communications service
providers that have a truly global presence in voice, data, IP and managed services. Given that
telecom is still a reasonably regulated industry in most countries and that scale, infrastructure
ownership and domestic presence have a crucial impact on service delivery capabilities, IT
managers will need to make the trade-off between global coverage and in-depth, local presence in
key markets / destinations.

The world has seen more changes in this decade than it has ever seen in the past. The next few
years will probably accelerate this change, in political, economic and social spheres.
Collaboration and innovation are the heartbeats that will drive this new networked world. It is a
world where the strategic adoption of communications and services will play a decisive role in
differentiating winners from the also-rans.