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Global Reach
problems and over time, pressure will reach down to small and mid-sized retailers to keep pace
in order to compete on efficiency and price.
“If you look at 95% of the retail business in India, it’s really mom and pop stores,” White explains.
“We have an opportunity in India to say, ‘Here is the retail store of the future and we just
built 10,000 of them.’ Imagine trying to do that in the U.S.; we wouldn’t get to that scale because
of the installed base of stores already here.”
The Fourth Utility
In areas like healthcare, education, and security, White sees the network as a fourth utility, overcoming
physical distance and enabling greater collaboration. In broader terms, Cisco vice president
for advanced services Parvesh Seti told a December 2007 conference on globalization of
services that the company is making a shift in India from fulfillment—delivering and installing
hardware ordered for a specific need defined by the customer—to demand creation, where Cisco
offers integrated hardware/services solutions to meet needs mutually defined by it and the customer.
Toward that end, Cisco is pursuing build-operate-transfer and remote infrastructure management
projects in areas like electrical power grids and smart road or transit systems.
The company has working partnerships with all five of India’s major IT companies, with the focus
on innovation—not just outsourcing. In October 2007, Cisco created a partnership with
Satyam to take a 911 emergency response system developed for Hyderabad national, establishing
intelligent routing of ambulances and offering information on non-emergency health services. In
November 2007, it launched a partnership with Wipro to deliver advanced IT services leveraging
Wipro’s expertise in infrastructure and Cisco’s in networking. As part of that partnership, the
company established a center at Wipro’s campus in Bangalore to create and launch new services
to address the Indian, Middle East, and African markets.
In September 2008, Cisco expanded the partnership with the announcement of a $1 billion alliance
to assist with remote management and leverage its global applications expertise. The company
has also partnered with Tata-owned Internet service provider Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd.
(VNSL) to develop bundled Internet phone, video on demand, videoconferencing, and other
services for Tata Indicom Broadband Services.
Cisco’s efforts to connect its India operations to its global voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP)
network opened up unexpected market opportunities in telecom services, beginning in 2005.
As mentioned earlier, Indian regulation prohibits interconnection between VoIP and the public
switched telephone network (PSTN). First, Cisco replaced its standard PBX systems with
Internet phones and its CallManager call processing technology, and then 5t linked corporate
sites over its data network for a purely internal VoIP system. Next, it negotiated a waiver from
the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India that allowed employees to join networked VoIP conference
calls from home because of the time differences involved. Voicemail was added, based
on an argument that stored and forwarded messages were distinct from real-time conversation
covered under the regulation. Finally, CallManager was modified to automatically route calls as
required to and from VoIP and the PSTN.
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