Kushal S Banerjee

As part of its efforts to move away from the image of a pure connectivity and access provider, iServ India, the wholly owned subsidiary of the $1 billion Escorts Group, is building up a considerable portfolio of value-added services to gain a sizeable foothold in the services market.

The networking company, which is also a Category A ISP license holder will be launching a slew of new services in the next one year. This includes ASP services for the financial segment and an end-to-end suite of services for the manufacturing and financial verticals. The company has recently launched its VoIP solutions for the retail and corporate segments. These initiatives will add strength to iServ’s existing value-added offering as a Managed Service Provider (MSP), launched in association with Tata Infotech a few months ago.

According to Kushal S Banerjee, CEO, iServ India Solutions, the company will be investing Rs 8 crore till March 2003 to fund its expansion activities. This will take the total investment to Rs 25 crore since the launch of company’s operations in May 2000.

The company is targeting to bring down revenues from the retail segment from 50 percent in the last financial year to 20 percent in the current financial year, and increase the proportion of revenues from its value-added offerings from the current 15-20 percent to 30-40 percent. “Vanilla services and plain selling of connectivity solutions will not be profitable in the long run. Hence, this strategic shift towards a total services approach,” explained Banerjee.

Banerjee said that as part of its ASP offering iServ would cater to specific areas only within the financial vertical. On the other hand, the company is in the process of developing a complete suite of service offerings that are domain-specific. While the offerings, which will be complete end-to-end services, will include iServ’s existing services there will also be new services, including ASP, added to the suite. Targeting the manufacturing and financial verticals, the company will be forging business partnerships with companies with domain expertise in the two verticals.

iServ has also marked an entry into the VoIP space to further strengthen its value-added portfolio on the voice services front.

It launched its VoIP solution, Zybertalk Supervoice in August this year for the Small and Medium Business (SMB) enterprise segment. Describing it as a mass distribution corporate product, Banerjee explained that the high point of the ‘in-a-box’ solution is that it allows customers to place low-cost international calls through the Internet without losing their investments in legacy telephone equipment. The solution comprises a VoIP gateway, pre-paid calling account, ISDN router and an ISDN Internet pack.

Zybertalk Supervoice utilises a high-speed Internet connection over ISDN. It supports calling through analogue handsets and has EPBAX compatibility and also supports protocols like H.323, SIP and MGCP. iServ is selling the product both directly, as well as through its channel partners.