Global Telecom Burst
...telecom bubble bursting,global growth has been sluggish, with a significant cutback in spending by telecom majors like Lucent and Nortel. Service providers who had a high cost of operational expenditure because of heavy investments made in networks during the heydays, are now looking at Indian software companies to provide offshore solutions to manage their network operations, support systems, billing software, OS integration and business process re-engineering.
Riding on the IT boom, the telecom vertical has redefined top lines of many IT vendors. Whether pure play telecom software providers or IT companies like Wipro or Infosys, telecom has emerged as a leading practice with solutions cutting across OSS/BSS to building custom specific applications. The telecom software market grew by 55% during FY '06-07, garnering revenues of Rs 17,871 crore. As usual, the front line IT companies took a major chunk of the revenues with TCS topping the charts. Another star performer was Tech Mahindra, which saw revenues soaring by 136% compared to the previous year.
The OSS/BSS space continues to be hot as it provides companies the opportunity to offer an umbrella of services. Also, this is the space where large telecom players need to efficiently deploy IT for several transactions like online billing and providing value added services. Competition and consolidation on the telecom space puts IT in the driver seat because when competitors become partners, there is a huge overhaul in terms of IT, as right from software to hardware, all digital assets have to be seamlessly integrated. As consolidation escalates both from an operator and vendor perspective, telecom software providers are bound to get new avenues for growth in the ongoing year. The major share of revenues still remain global centric with domestic opportunity coming from players like Airtel and others.
Players...
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