The enterprise market comprises of high value services for the enterprises and at the same time it is a huge potential market for the operators to increase their declining ARPU.

Looking at the various positive developments taking place in the Indian telecom industry, we would say that enterprise VAS is going to be the next big thing in the VAS industry. The enterprise market comprises of high value services for the enterprises and at the same time it is a huge potential market for the operators to increase their declining ARPU. Subscription based models, sache based pricing, and mobile advertising are few trends, which have a huge potential in the Indian market.

On major vendors

Our major vendors include infrastructure providers such as IBM and HP and also telecom equipment manufacturers like Dialogic and AudioCodes.

On expectations from vendors

We would like them to work with us on a different business model altogether, may be some sort of revenue sharing business model, where we can work together in a more cohesive manner, sharing the business risks. This will definitely lead to a stronger partnership and will be a more effective business model especially in tougher times, when there is a pressure on the incoming operator revenue.

In this way, we would like to involve our vendors directly into the VAS ecosystem, wherein, they can also expect a chunk of the end revenue. This will encourage them to contribute to the VAS industry in terms of continuous innovations.

On challenges faced

The major challenges that we would like to highlight are regulatory and compliance issues in VAS services, low revenue share model among the players in the VAS value chain, difficulty in procuring quality content, offering innovative and useful services that can entice the customers, and user friendliness of VAS applications.

All the players in the VAS value chain need to collectively act and work on resolving these challenges in order to let this industry grow, bigger.

There are a lot of players in the VAS industry and there is a severe price war going on amongst these players. There is no control on the price and promotion of VAS services. Hence, there is a need for standardization in the VAS industry. Regulatory compliance guidelines have to be set in various mobile VAS services that are being offered today. Another improvement that we would like to talk about is the creation of a level playing field among all the members of the VAS ecosystem including operators.

On future outlook

We believe that the future of VAS is going to be very exciting as well as productive for the mobile subscribers. The time has come when we need to study the actual usage, pain-points and unfelt need of the mobile subscribers to offer them an effective VAS solution to make their life easy, productive, and more entertaining.

On green initiatives

Netxcell is making significant efforts toward green initiatives. The infrastructure that we use, we make sure, consumes less energy. We are also making an effort to make Netxcell's office paperless to a great extent, and most of the information flow in our office is through electronic media.