Unitech Wireless selects Wipro to create Telecom Company of the future

BANGALORE, INDIA: Unitech Wireless, the newest telecom services player in India, today announced that it had awarded a multi-hundred-million long term outsourcing contract to Wipro for creating the next generation telecom company.

Unitech Wireless, with licences to operate in all 22 circles across India, is launching state-of-the-art telecommunication services to provide advanced wireless voice, data and ILD/, NLD services. Unitech Wireless proposes to succeed in this highly attractive and fast growing telecom market, with a strong differentiator in customer experience and service delivery. To achieve its ambitious goals, Unitech Wireless has structured its organization and operational architecture around innovation, scalability and flexibility. Its partnership with Wipro will enable this uniqueness and provide non-linear, scaleable growth, while delivering the highest levels of customer service to their subscribers.

Commenting on the association with Wipro, Rohit Chandra, Chief Operating Officer, Unitech Wireless, said: “We are launching a Greenfield telecom operation and want to create a strong customer proposition for our services based on cutting edge technology and business processes aligned with IT. We chose Wipro as our partner because among the service providers in this field, we felt that they brought a unique combination of domain expertise, market knowledge and a customer-centric approach that allows us to grow together.”

Suresh Vaswani, Joint CEO, IT Business & Member of the Board, Wipro Ltd, added: “We are excited to partner with Unitech and Telenor to help build Unitech Wireless which promises to be one of the leading differentiated telecom service providers in India in the years to come. Unitech Wireless has a unique customer-centred approach and the business-technology alignment will ensure that subscribers get the latest services. India is a huge growth market and we are delighted that Unitech Wireless has offered us this opportunity to work with them."

Wipro is a leader in the telecom service provider space and will leverage its global expertise to implement a future-ready IT architecture in accordance with industry standards. This will deliver a scalable, flexible and secure platform comprising a suite of industry leading software applications.

Wipro will also deploy component based Service Delivery Platform (SDP) for Unitech Wireless to deliver wide range of services including Multi Channel Access, Real Time Information Delivery, Multimedia Content and VAS. It is expected that the Wipro’s-Unitech Wireless partnership will transform the way in which the telecom industry operates, and create new benchmarks for business-technology alignment. Wipro will be working with Unitech Wireless right from the launch and taking responsibility for key aspects of the service infrastructure.

telisma launches teliSpeech in 10 Indian languages

Paris, France based telisma has released teliSpeech, its leading speech-recognition software in India in 10 languages. These languages are: Indian English, Indian Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi.

The teliSpeech, telisma's core proprietary software product, has been in the Indian market since June 2004. It offers superior robustness, scalability and performance -- especially in mobile environments -- and comes with a comprehensive set of administration and management tools.

Laurent Balaine, chairman and CEO, telisma, said: "This is an important time for telisma. telisma will open up the voice market and allow the Indian population to access services and information by using their voice. India is a major part of telisma's international development strategy, and as such, we will be continuing our solid investment."

He added that telisma's product portfolio had been conceived and developed with openness in mind, in order to allow its partners to create their speech-recognition solutions using Eclipse-based tools.

He added: "Until now, people could not use their own language. We intend covering 95 percent of the population. We do speech recognition and you don't need to train the PC as it is internetworked."

telsima works with a range of companies, including system integrators and with companies providing infrastructure for the call centers, such as Cisco, Genesys, Avaya and HP. Voice service providers can also become partners.

"Until now, the market for such products in India was small. Now, more people would want to access services," he added. "Our technology is good for social networking as well, as we believe, information is knowledge. Indian companies can take this product and build applications around it to serve banks, enterprises, etc."

Regarding Indian English as a language, Balaine said telisma made use of several native English speakers, similar to what it did for Hindi. This enabled the system to recognize with high accuracy.

Keen to attract Indian software developers
The teliSpeech software has been developed using tools from Eclipse, a major Open Source initiative, which also includes IBM. Balaine said,"Eclipse has now become a major standard."

telisma is also keen on developing a community of software developers in India. He said: "Our idea is to offer software developers the tools and an open environment to develop and products they can sell anywhere. The availability of an open envvironment will help them a lot."

telisma offers an evaluation software for free download on its site. It can be tested on a local PC for 30 days. If the software developers can build applications around teliSpeech during that period, they can buy the license from telisma.

Major India plans
telisma will be opening a liaison office in Bangalore before the end of this year. "We are also in touch with system integrators like Wipro," Balaine added. telisma also intends working with the mobile phone service providers in India through partners.

"Genesys has also sold our products in India," he added. "We will also leverage on our partnerships in India, for example, with Cisco, HP, etc. We will also go to local partners in value-added services and in the CRM space."

As for voice interaction with wireless services, he said that it was more of accessing voice services, while on the move. Here, there is an opportunity for location-based services to be available in voice.

telisma has a fully indirect business model. It partners with leading computer telephony hardware and platforms, along with global and local brand name integrators. Some of its international partners include IVR platform vendors such as Genesys, HP, Avaya, Cisco and Envox. System integrators include Wipro, Cap Gemini, NextiraOne and Atos Origin. Voice service provider partners include Prosodie and Jet Multimedia, while solution partners include Voice Objects.