At Bharti Airtel's swank Network Experience Centre (NEC) in Manesar, a few miles west of its headquarters in Gurgaon, KPI is more than an acronym. Key performance indicators crop up on those zany screens as virtual breadwinners for a company striving to make data a way of life. Here, 20-somethings crunch data to marry network KPIs, like outage rate and call drop rate with customer dynamics, in what has come to be known across the company as Customer Experience Management. "If you are a heavy user of data, I would like to see the kind of handset you use, your data usage in video, websites or games, the areas you roam, the speed you get," says Jagbir Singh, Director-Network Services Group, Bharti Airtel.
In many ways, this is the company's cockpit, from where it monitors any issue with its 190 million-odd subscribers countrywide. "The NEC sets the benchmark for telecom in South Asia and helps us manage the layers of complex networks and technologies across our product matrix and massive scale of operations. Essentially, we will be able to analyse and deliver a seamless experience to over 200 million customers across our verticals from one location," says Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman & Managing Director, Bharti Airtel.
So if there is a concern on speed, the techies immediately raise a flag that's cascaded down the sales team to address the handset or the fixed line user. And more than reactive measures, the company proactively does a lot of caching here too. So rather than going for each and every content to the US, it caches the more popular homepages in its server right here. "Today, we cache around 35% of data consumption all over the country," says K Srinivas, President-Consumer Business, Bharti Airtel.
Data from three content aggregators - Google, Akamai and LimeWire - are cached in its own server so that as soon as the subscriber keys in a search term, the website is readily available. "It reduces the latency and gives a better throughput," says Singh.
Now consider how Airtel is using technology to animate myriad possibilities in its B2B domain. On January 22, it launched the Dynamic Mobile Exchange (DME), which works on the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) logic. Basically, the tech allows any organisation that's a business client of Airtel, to separate its employees' phones into two components - official and personal. So if the employee wants to access emails, business apps like ERP or CRM, performance reviews, he can do so since it is password-protected and has a single sign-in to access all business applications, including email. "But the CIO fears that if the employee gets total access to office data, he may misuse it in his private domain," says Najib Khan, CMO-Airtel Business, Bharti Airtel. So Airtel DME goes on to allay the CIO's fear by ensuring data is secure and not allowing it to cross over from the official to the personal domain of the employee. Data can also be erased remotely. Airtel executives are hopeful the new product will have high traction going forward since many companies are seen breaking convention and promoting flexi-hours, giving their employees greater freedom. Also, as the age bracket comes down in organizations, the youth prefer all apps to be on one device. This is where BYOD can really make a dent.
Experience matters
Be it DME or tracking a customer grouse, Airtel plays with the full gamut of technology - EDGE, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, fiber, MPLS, IPLC and many more corporate solutions. "The winners in the data space will be the operators who will come with the best customer experience and not necessarily those who will come with the best technology," says Sanjay Kapoor, the outgoing CEO of Bharti Airtel-India & South Asia.
That said, from a handset, nomadic (dongle) and fixed line subscriber point of view, the range of technologies from 2G to Wi-Fi is baffling. And the higher the subscriber goes in the tech curve, the greater his fallback option. For instance, at the lowest 2G or GPRS level, if the device does not get GPRS signals, the customer cannot fall back on a lower technology as that does not exist. But if he uses 2.5G (EDGE), his fallback option is viably GPRS. Similarly, if he graduates to 3G, which has a peak throughput of 21mbps, he has the option to fall back on 2.5G or EDGE and if he uses 4G with a peak throughput of 70-80mbps, he can obviously fall back on 3G as well as the lower technologies.
Tech-tonic shift
The company already has about 140,000 2.5G Base-station Trans-receiver Systems (BTS), which are boxes attached to telecom towers that provide bandwidth to the neighbourhood. According to Jagbir Singh, another 10,000-odd 2.5G BTS and the fate of the EDGE network for Airtel in India will be sealed. Singh has set up 25,000 3G sites (BTS) last year. And this is where the action will be for a long time to come. Per megabyte offerings are not just 30-40% cheaper on 3G, it is a far more data efficient technology than 2.5G. But ARPUs (average revenue per user) go up significantly as the 3G customer is a bulk user of data. Similarly, 4G is much more efficient than 3G and cost per megabyte of data is about 70% cheaper than 3G. In FMCG speak, it is much like buying a bigger bottle of soap. While it may be costlier than the sachet, the consumer has far more bubbles to play with. Like sachets, in a data-hugging world, EDGE can never match the price-value equation of either 3G or 4G. But since 4G is still a nomadic option in limited cities as 4G devices are few and far between, Airtel's focus is largely on deploying 3G sites.
Airtel launched its 3G services a year-and-a-half ago. Of the 42 million Airtel subscribers who access internet on mobile, approximately 4.5 million are 3G users. Since a large chunk of subscribers still use EDGE and GPRS, those networks will remain but all new investments would go in to beef up 3G and 4G networks. "High speed wireless broadband has the potential to transform India, provide a robust platform for building the country's digital economy and truly empower people," says Mittal.
Frenemy quotient
Of course, every 'G' or generation of technology's success depends on the spectrum an operator receives from the government through auctions. So while the cloud is yet to clear on availability of more spectrum or the transparency of the auction process, Airtel has gone ahead knitting up valuable tie-ups at every generation of technology with device manufacturers, content factories, application providers, IT companies and systems integrators.
This has given rise to a homegrown term-'Frenemies'-that Kapoor flaunts quite unabashedly. "We compete as well as collaborate with our partners," he points out. For instance, while Apple collaborates with Airtel on its iPhone devices offering Airtel services and data plan, the two companies compete over apps on their respective app stores.
Friends or enemies, it is an ecosystem of partnerships that is enabling the company to stay ahead of the curve by notching up consumers. "Airtel works with OEMs to make customer on-boarding simpler and innovations help improve customer experience... so it is clearly not waiting for a device ecosystem to develop," says Neeraj Aggarwal, Partner & Director, BCG. He adds that with incremental technologies, Airtel does not want to be a mere pipe or access provider but take the digitization theme forward covering the entire gamut of data usage.
Walk the talk
In doing so, Airtel had to ensure it was organizationally ready for data influx. "We had to change the look and feel of the organization from a vertical orientation of mobile, fixed line, broadband and DTH division to just B2C and B2B divisions....we became consumer rather than technology facing," explains Kapoor. That was important as data is seamless and goes through various technology transfers.
Internally, the operator devised a 3D strategy - demystifying data and devices, which comprised an e-learning certification module, a classroom training programme for the 4,500-odd salesforce and niche specialized courses for folks in the B2B space. "We have a Twitter handle with over a thousand members, which we use to discuss cutting-edge tech. Once in 2-3 weeks, people across the industry come down and deliver a talk and every office has a Data Experience Zone where employees come and spend time with the available devices," says Dipak Roy, Head-HR, Consumer Business Operations, Bharti Airtel, adding that the route his company has chosen calls for all its 15,000-odd employees to live their lives in the data world.
Moreover, standard HR practices, like reverse mentoring is taken seriously across the organisation. In 2008, Kapoor's then 22-year-old reverse mentor, Amit Singh, introduced him to Manchester United and F1. Later, Airtel tied up with both sport bodies to shore up its youth quotient. Kapoor claims that the youth has sparked many innovations across the company, such as SmartByte, or bandwidth on demand, and data plan sharing.
Staying at innovations, the bulk of marketing thrust at Airtel's consumer arm is now on gauging solutions for connections that provide near about 100mbps speed. The 4G consumer, growing at 78% a month, is a heavy video user. So a whole host of video on demand and security solutions are being mulled over. "You can install a camera at home and configure a certain time or any movement in it and it automatically captures the visuals on your mobile as an app," says Srinivas, offering a sneak peek into tomorrow's services.
Business as unusual
Aggression in the consumer-facing business of Airtel is echoed across its business division too. The company's B2B arm straddles three main divisions-global wholesale business, the enterprise and government business (EGB) and small and medium businesses (SMBs). While the first one deals with buying and selling of high capacity bandwidth accounting for, say, 3% of the business revenues, EGB can stake claim to nearly 70% of the business pie, while SMB's account for the remaining 27%.
Increasingly, corporate clients are showing an affinity for cloud services. "Top corporates are demanding to move to cloud, at least the non-critical part of their data, like emails, video conferencing, audio conferencing," says Najib Khan. With real estate prices hardening, it is no more feasible for companies to keep buying servers. Simply put, they are looking at a pay per use model, instead of maintaining their own data centres. This is where the managed services of Airtel peak as the company hosts all data needs of its clients across its seven data centres countrywide.
Yet another area is location-based service. The company has two products already in this space-TrackMATE and TraceMATEto facilitate mobile enablement of tracking assets and tracing people. It is a promising category since it is linked to performance.
However, the most interesting division in the company's tech space seems to be the M2M, or machine-to-machine, vertical. It is work in progress and company executives are loath to talk about it. By all accounts, the team working on this part of the business is rather small at this point of time. But this is it-high potential, high value, and definitely, higher bang for the buck. Simply put, it is about machines interfacing with other machines to make life easier. For instance, it is possible for intelligent cars to communicate with the server at the owner's insurance company directly and feed in his driving history and auto records to make the system more transparent and seamless. Again, a sim card inserted in a chipset tied around the arm of a patient can transmit his health vital stats to the doctor in real time. "M2M as a category holds promise in industries where reading can be automated, and nowadays, virtually every industry is automated," says Benoy CS, Director-ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan.
The deeper one dives into data, greater the linkages between innovation and collaboration. So far, Bharti Airtel has done well to recognize the twin pillars of data. It has even reoriented its organizational structure to become a data-facing enterprise. It's now up to the 200-odd data devotees at the company's Network Experience Centre to connect the dots and ensure Airtel's data quest is more than a pipe dream.
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