T&M Industry in India : Will FY 14 see the Basics of Network Management and measurement?

TESTING TOOLS,  ACCESS  , AUTOMATION ,NETWORK MEASUREMENTS  & NETWORK
MANAGEMENT  are competitors or partners?


We are seeing increasing clamour of new technology becoming a new source of competition and corporate rivalry as more and more networks are being rolled out.The typical situation in India is that we have been seeing a drop in growth of new subscribers and the revenue from the Voice services we are simultaneously seeing a fillip in rollout of advanced technologies too. So, the Quality,Productivity and Profitability of both the new and old networks is under scanner.The T&M once again has to respond to this challenge.The decision is not going to be taken by the CTO or even the CFO in isolation but Business has to drive the T&M procurement challenge !

Deployment phase generally involves the installation related long-term analysis of pre-defined test procedures and sequence stored on the test templates.Portables need to be deployed for most of the measurements.Ease of use and robustness become the key here.During the maintenance phase the same thing is turned to baseline or out of the baseline measurements are needed,Tributaries are monitored and full glance remote control and unambiguous quality assesment done by the Automation based systems.This actually becomes more of Management than just Measurement described earlier.

Areas in common between management and measurements are found in the field of monitoring systems and statistical analysis & prediction.And actually the impact of these on opex determines our view on what and how much of both will be invested in.We may have either of these operating philosophy-either use a method outside the system or integrate the testing in to the system.Separate measurements are needed to detect the faults in the manufacturers products,but the inbuilt test systems are more powerful and less expensive.However the flexibility is more in out of system Portables type of T&M.

Todays scenario in India requires us to go back to these basics when 4G technology is at the threshold of deployment, new networks are getting into the mainstream of tornado,and yet the opex and capex need to be managed in such a way we dont make T&M becoming drag on the Business !

T&M Industry in India : FY14 can be the year of Interface/Interoperability Testing ?

IDEA  OF ENSURING AUTHENTIC  INTERFACE / INTEROPERABILITY  TESTING

The Big Picture objectives of  our T&M Industry is primarily  to help create the Ecosystems where the QUALTY , PRODUCTIVITY', CONFORMANCE  and PERFORMANCE  aspects of the User industry can be improved and assured. Such an entity or an organisation has to be created in India either through Regulatory Framework in different sectors or can be developed to augment so that an existing setup can go up to highest level of Credibility and Reference. Since T&M industry serves many sectors of our Economy it is important we prioritise, and focus on those sectors with immediate and high impact on Society and Consumer protection. In this blog posting I will Cover Telecom related needs of such an organisation.

Most of the T&M techniques and Quality in Data and Voice Networks is done through test and measurement of Electronics Equipment.The Test & Management of the Networks Interfaces and Interoperability is realised by the Collaborative efforts of Industry , Test Labs and Staff , Global Standards Organisation and National Governments adhering to agreed norms for that sector.While we have these organisations in some fragmented form,and bits and pieces in Telecom we  the Integrated approach hasnt been tried successfully.

In this blog we will bring out the key objectives of such an organisation,so that it is Vendor Neutral,Technology Current, on par with Indian and Global Standards of Performance & Conformance ,Academia  and Regulator. Industry Users, the Standards Body and other stakeholders
will be part of this organisation. Organisationally it had to be autonomous in its working and can be a Society on the lines of CDoT  or some variant. It will have its own Board to manage and direct its activities and draw people from Technology Industry, Administrative background and Legal and Corporate  Law expertise.

Such an organisation will have other components to it,and we will discuss these in some subsequent blogs.However one thing is clear that such an organisation is overdue and FY14 could be and should be the year of its Logical Founding & implementation.


 

T&M Industry in India : Ideating for FY 14

So, the new financial year FY14 is here. We continue to watch major sectors intently.Some good news in Telecom ( Cooperation between major Corporates announced !) started the new year.As well as the Prime Minister taking a very motivating instance in front of India Inc. While  I am happy for the renewed optimism ,both our real Economy and Capital Economy doesnt give lot of inspiring indication.Globally the US Economy is getting stabilised with 2% solid growth.This growth may trigger hope to our own tech sector on the services side!

There is always a big risk when one tries to think some curative ideas for newer growth possibilities.But let me be the bad boy and suggest the T&M sector a fresh approach to generate sales through what I call -Enterprise Test Integration, ETI - approach.This is proposed for both Manufacturing and Deployment Projects but more for Manufacturing standpoint.Manufacturing in Electronics and Telecom really is somewhere in between R&D and Field Service segments of T&M.This is not penetrated on a Systemic Basis. By that what I mean is the Sales guy is still boxed in the mentality of selling boxes to individual users,but not thinking of the total factory as the T&M buyer -the Boxes plus the Softwares, Services and Test Management - for the total enterprise.The T&M sales guy along with the other solution architects needs to adopt "Total Manufacturing Test Solution" as the pitch rather than the Boxes to drive maximum Enterprise Share rather than selling
Boxes alone.

I firmly believe that T&M in India is exposing itself to various gaps in selling approach as these professionals are highly stuck up with portable boxes.They havent groomed themselves to what are the Business Issues of a Manufacturer? How a T&M sales guy can bring in newer skills from his support stable ( IT integration, third party hardware and software and other vendors in rhythm) to offer superior ETI package for them. This will automatically wrap bigger revenues for T&M industry and reduce pains for the customer. Let us hope we see some success in FY14 for ETI based selling.
I will be very keen to assist finding their first such customer !