“Baypackets’ credentials will help shorten sales cycle in India”

Kenneth Epps, president and CEO of Baypackets, and Sanjeev Chawla, its co-founder and CTO, explain to SHIPRA ARORA how the company can make a difference to the current voice and video offerings coming from Indian service providers

You say Baypackets is ready for a leap. Please explain.

Epps: The company, till recently, was focused on the development of its core platform, the Agility Network Services Platform (NSP), which can be deployed as a Service Control Point (SCP) or application server in a carrier’s network. Now, with the core platform and applications developed, we are ready for deployments. We have reached a point where the platform is ready for a major take-off. Baypackets has already got 10 customers in the US and Europe, and we are all set for the APAC market. In the next few months, we will be adding customers in Japan and Malaysia.

In addition to this, company has major scaling-up plans on the development front. We are planning to invest around $30 million over the next three years in our India Development Centre at Noida. The headcount will be tripled in a year from the current strength of 75.

Now that your core platform is in place, how will your development activities focus on enhancing the platform’s capabilities?

Chawla: As part of our development expansion plans, we are forming two groups. These are the 3G and wireless group and the customer focus group (CFG). The 3G and wireless group will launch wireless initiatives to support 3G services. The focus will be on getting 3G introduced, and we will be aligned with that as customers build 3G networks.

On the other hand, the CFG will concentrate on aggressive business development and understanding of requirements in the APAC region. The three-fold agenda will include working on development and enhancements specific to different countries.

Over the next two years there will be more introductions in terms of applications and capabilities riding on top of Agility NSP. Over a period of time, we will also introduce vertical services into the market. This will include understanding the requirements of different verticals like finance and retail, and creating specific solutions for them. It will initially be launched in advanced markets and later on in developing markets like India.

Leaving aside India’s potential as a development hub, how do you see its market potential? Aren’t you a little handicapped by your late entry?

Epps: We are now starting to target the Indian market with our solutions. A proven international track record will help us get better results in India. We are able to bring these credentials to the table. This will probably help us shorten the sales cycle, which is typically quite long. We are presently in various stages of talks with service providers in India in the wired, wireless and VoIP areas. We are expecting some deals to come through.

How will you strategise your offerings considering the market is currently witnessing price wars?

Chawla: The Indian market is growing and its service potential has not been fully tapped. There is a huge untapped potential as far as business services are concerned. The focus of carriers here has been on consumer services and on bringing down the cost of services to expand the subscriber base. This, however, has to give way to enhanced services to customers, and providing business applications.

We see a lot of push coming from enhanced services and business applications like voice VPN, advanced toll free, voice mail, unified communications, personal communications manager, find-me and follow-me, which will cut across multiple networks. We are positioned to help carriers get into enhanced business services.

What requirements will next generation SCPs have to meet?

Chawla: Some of the typical challenges with SCPs today have been their proprietary architecture, point solution for services, lack of service portability, limited third-party applications, lack of OSS/BSS integration, and switch dependencies.