Mahindra Comviva RADAR can drive QoE at telecoms: Anurag Srivastava

By Nandita Singh

Anurag Srivastava, Senior VP and unit head Managed Services at Mahindra Comviva in a tete-a-tete with Voice&Data talks about how his business unit is going after Managed Customer Experience Services and where its Rapid Auto Detection and Advanced Reporting, referred to as RADAR, fits in the scheme of things.

Voice&Data: What made Mahindra Comviva re-brand its Managed Services offering as Managed Customer Experience Services offering?

Anurag Srivastava: There is a paradigm shift. Operators are transforming into Digital Service Providers (DSPs) and have to follow the consumption trend of consumers. The consumer is at the center of our approach too, and that is why we have re-positioned our unit at Mahindra Comviva as Managed Customer Experience Services unit. There is an upsurge in data consumption… ‘digital content experience’ is becoming flavour of the decade. One key trend that is emerging is unification of experience on different devices. Add to this, Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M) – areas where future growth will come from. Connected applications are already becoming commonplace. Managing these trends for an operator is where our services come into play – in assuring service and experience quality.

In the developed world, data makes for 50 percent of overall revenue. As far as data explosion is concerned, India is at the beginning of the cusp and going ahead this will bring complexity in the network. To decode this complexity, and make these services work for customer as a unified experience, interoperability is required. And Quality of Experience (QoE) is not easy to deliver.

If I were to sum up the paradigm shift in the way we look at it, I would say, there is a shift in our thoughts. End-customer is at the center of our approach. Not services. And we will evolve services aligned with end-consumer requirement.

Voice&Data: So, how are you delivering on this Managed Customer Experience Service in view of the emerging trends in India?

Anurag Srivastava: In a global survey, 68% of operators listed customer experience (QoE) as their single most important focus area. According to Gartner, globally, average data usage per user by 2020 will grow to 4.8 GB from about 500MB currently. India market is also at the cusp of data boom, online streaming is going to grow big time. Interoperability and security will remain two of the industry’s biggest challenges. This is where Mahindra Comviva’s Rapid Auto Detection and Advanced Reporting offering also known as RADAR fits in. RADAR is an autonomous model that facilitates the capture of data related to QoE, performance and QoS using a combination of mobile simulation, trend analysis and data analytics enabling operators to detect and fix various service-related issue before their business is impacted.

Fully flexible and configurable RADAR is running a couple of POCs (Proof of Concept) with telcos and we are talking to almost all operators about it. The solution helps to identify and resolve service-related issues, improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and enhance an operator’s market position. Moreover, the single system scales easily to monitor large multi-technology services, providing service-wide and heterogeneous technology service management. The solution’s centralized monitoring module keeps operational costs in check while it can be monitored remotely as well. It takes away most of the pain points of operators allowing them to serve better QoE to their subscribers.

RADAR's cognitive learning model positions it above any measuring instrument/ techniques that we have today. Its cognitive auto learning actually improves the overall performance without any human intervention. And, I am proud to say that RADAR has been developed and brought to the market by Mahindra Comviva.

Voice&Data: So, what kind of growth you are expecting with this latest upgrade in your offerings for the operators?

Anurag Srivastava: You see business model for operators are changing. Globally, we work across multi-operators in about 20 countries. Africa is a big market for us. So, is South East Asia followed by India, which is at a maturity curve where there is re-ordering of growth therefore this unit may not see growth explosion to match the data explosion, but surely we will match the double digit growth that telcos can expect going ahead in mid-term.