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First Coffee - India's ICT Market, CRM and The Full Moon, Mobile CRM Forecast, Integrated Research's Prognosis, Philippine VoIP Regulations
By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Frank Sinatra’s The Platinum Collection:
Philippine VoIP providers will be required to post a performance-guarantee bond, according to the Filipino news service ABS-CBN.
“Besides a minimum paid-up capital, firms interested in offering voice calls over the Internet, or VoIP have to post a performance bond to guarantee the delivery of services to the public,” the National Telecommunications Commission said.
The Philippine journal Business World called the move an effort “to block fly-by-night providers, but at the risk of preventing some bona fide applicants.”
The NTC will require VoIP service-providers, defined as “a person or entity providing the service directly to the public or through resellers for compensation,” to post a P5-million performance bond on top of raising at least P10 million ($180,000) in paid-up capital.
In addition to the bond, anyone register as a VOIP service reseller, defined as “persons or entities that intend to derive or source VoIP service from a duly registered VoIP provider under an agreement to resell the service directly to retail end-user customers,” is required to show proof that the entity is at least 60 percent owned by Filipinos.
According to ABS-CBN, the Philippine National Economic and Development Authority estimates that VoIP can reduce the cost of current international calls “as much as 75 percent, from the present $0.40 to only about $0.10 a minute, or even lower, as is the case in other Asian countries.”
Business World reports that the Philippines has seen “long-drawn debates over telecommunication firms’ rights as service providers and the right of typically small value-added service companies like internet service providers to offer this service at rates that could be much cheaper than those of big telcos.”
Telcos argue that VoIP is a voice service, the journal says, “noting that, under Republic Act No. 7925, only telcos that have Congressional franchise can roll out voice services.” VAS providers contend that “hefty financial requirements” should not be “slapped on a service that, theoretically, does not require that much capital to offer and that this is one business that evens the playing field.”
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Happy birthday, Joe DiMaggio, one of the most graceful and classy athletes in history.
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Integrated Research, developers of Prognosis performance monitoring products, has announced a partnership with T-Systems, a division of Deutsche Telekom, for a major VoIP deployment in Germany.
The company also announced the opening of a new office in the center of Frankfurt to support its customer base and to target new IP telephony opportunities in the region.
Prognosis is an established provider in Germany with clients such as DB Systems (Deutsche Bahn) and Deutsche Bank. “We had committed to open the new European office in Frankfurt and this new partnership with T-Systems has reinforced our decision,” said Keith Andrews, CEO of Integrated Research.
Over the past 17 years Integrated Research has concentrated on building up its Central European business for their HP NonStop server performance management products, relying on the support of local distributors. Andrews says the firm is now “investing in a more direct presence to address the rapidly emerging German market for VoIP and IP telephony performance management.”
The Gartner Group predicts compound annual growth of business VoIP in Western Europe at 37 per cent annually, which represents 11.7 million new IP telephones deployed by 2009.
Wolfgang Sattel, Service Delivery Manager from T-Systems, said corporations are now “starting to roll out large IP telephony deployments.”
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Happy birthday Andrew Carnegie. He emigrated to America from Scotland as a penniless youth, and became one of the wealthiest Americans of his time in the steel industry, retiring on a guaranteed pension of one million dollars a month for life. He spent the last years of his life giving away his vast fortune, endowing 2,811 libraries and buying 7,689 organs for churches to “lessen the pain of the sermons.”
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“After years of false starts,” says a new study, “Mobile CRM: Re-energizing the CRM,” published by industry research company visiongain, “the market for mobile CRM finally started to gain traction in 2004 and this has continued through 2005.”
Although still a “nascent market,” the report says, “mobile CRM should be reasonably robust on a global scale by 2007.”
The study found that, to this point, mobile CRM has accounted for less than 10% of total CRM revenues, but believes it will continue to show steady growth. In fact, it predicts, “mobile CRM will exceed traditional CRM growth rates to account for 20% of total CRM revenues by 2010 as the market matures.”
“In 2001, extending enterprise applications to a wireless environment was touted as the ‘next big thing’ and nothing happened,” says report author Marcia Kaplan, citing “security, usability problems with handheld devices, and costs” as major impediments. But after what Kaplan describes as investing in the necessary technology and outfitting their field personnel with mobile devices, “businesses are looking to maximize their investment and mobile CRM is the next rational step.”
A traditional CRM deployment usually involves only the Independent Software Vendor and the end-user. With a mobile deployment the number of participants is more extensive. Typically a mobile CRM implementation involves the ISV, Kaplan says, a middleware vendor, possibly a systems integrator, a device manufacturer, and a wireless operator.
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Just amazing, what CRM can teach a company. England’s Essex Medical & Forensic Services has been using Microsoft’s CRM 3.0 since April. The service, which organizes medical cover for the police across Essex, Suffolk, Cambridge and Bedfordshire, has found that while Friday and Saturday nights are busy nights – which they expected – activity also increases at the full moon. Which they did not expect. CRM at work, folks, diapers and beer.
According to industry observer Colin Barker, Steve Roberts, commercial director with EMFS says that the ability to plan for the full moon is “a big plus” in the CRM system, according to EMFS.
EMFS has been in existence for just a year, set up as part of the British government’s sensible plans to privatize “non-core services” such as medical care for people in police custody. It supplies doctors, nurses and other medical personnel when required.
The doctors and nurses working for EMFS all have other medical jobs, Barker says, “usually in the NHS, and only do occasional shifts.” Roberts didn’t want a dedicated medical system to coordinate the staff, saying they were all too expensive and complicated, and found that a CRM system worked better.
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According to India Business Insight, research firm Gartner, Inc. has said that India is the fastest-growing information and communication technology industry in the world. Focusing on “the export market instead of capitalizing on the opportunities in the buoyant domestic market,” the ICT market in India is likely to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 19 percent to cross $54.8 billion by 2008, up from $29.5 billion in 2004, Gartner says, adding that ICT exports from India will hit $16.5 billion for 2005.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.
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