NSN CEO: India Market Still 'Soft'

Nokia Siemens Networks CEO Rajeev Suri has identified India, along with China and the 'Eurozone', as "soft" markets that are contributing to a flat market for telecom vendors in 2012.

In an exclusive interview with Light Reading, Suri states that he does not expect to see an increase in investments by telecom operators in 2012, and notes that India is "a softening economy then there's the whole thing with the licenses, though I am hearing some operators saying they will up their game and be more aggressive, but let's see."

Suri goes on to talk about the growing importance of customer experience management (CEM) systems to operators, and, without identifying Bharti Airtel Ltd., talks about how an operator in India has deployed NSN's CEM platform "on a live network in 22 circles and it processes and analyzes and throws intelligence out of about 1 billion records every 15 minutes on a live network. That was not possible earlier." (See Bharti's New Experience.)

He adds that using CEM systems is now much easier for non-technical executives such as Chief Marketing Officers. "If the CMO is sitting in the room and is looking at activation data, call set-up success rate, call drop rate those are not interesting things for a CMO. Nowadays, it's in layman's language -- network not accessible, this number of platinum subscribers. Hit the 'network not accessible' icon and it will show you South Mumbai, North Mumbai, East Mumbai it will show you what's happening in South Mumbai and which of your platinum subscribers don't have accessibility and why. It will show you what kind of terminals they are using, how many iPhones, how many Samsung devices, all of that. It really is the CMO's dream."

Suri talked about market conditions and CEM in the second part of his interview, which will appear on Light Reading on April 5.

In the first part of the interview, he talked about the vendor's restructuring process and how NSN is investing in R&D (and where he says that the Philippines is now a more cost-effective R&D location than India). (See .)

Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading