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How cloud is helping telcos cut cost
The project manager at Grameen Foundation India, Kamalika Sen, is trying to better medical treatment by reaching out to patients through an interactive voice response system hosted on the Internet. Through the system, patients are reminded of their medication timings and given health tips.
"For patients on regulated medication, this is our application," says Sen who is heading a pilot called Motech. Patients can also give health-related information that can be reviewed by physicians later. A few years back, it would have been wellnigh impossible to create such a system without spending lakhs to procure hardware, hiring people to configure the system or paying for the phone lines that are idle except when the scheduled calls are made.
Things have significantly eased thanks to a set of cloud telephony firms, which sit between the telecom infrastructure provider and the consumer providing web-based easy-to-use telephony solutions - hosted on the cloud and served on a pay-per-use basis. This implies that customers will not have to buy and manage expensive telephone infrastructure.
Not only not-for-profit organisations, but even small and medium companies are embracing cloud telephony to give business a price edge. The Grameen Foundation India is one of the many users of Ozonetel, the cloud telephony company whose interface was used to create Motech. Bigger customers of the company include Zipdial and Hyundai Trident, a leading Bangalore dealer of the Korean automaker. Ozonetel offers Kookoo, a programming interface through which users can build applications like interactive voice recording systems and create outbound campaigns.
At least six to seven startups are trying to disrupt a hardware- and cost-intensive business by offering such services. "The technology people use now is from the seventies, but the world has moved on," says Ishwar Sridharan, co-founder of Exotel, a startup based on cloud telephony. The Bangalore company makes it easy to create applications like intelligent call routing and voice response systems by offering a dragand-drop Web interface.
These companies also aggregate infrastructure by buying telephone lines and bandwidth from operators and offering it on the tap to buyers who sign up. Clients are typically small and medium firms or individuals who can not afford expensive telephony equipment. "Small and medium businesses are looking to grow and having a professional telephony system has become a part of it -- like having a website," says KB Sanish, an analyst at Gartner.
A typical example of how cloud telephony can help businesses is playing out at Hyundai Trident. The dealer network with about 14 branches in the city had a private branch exchange installed at each branch. A receptionist had to man the telephones in each branch and route the call to the relevant person based on the customer's need.
At the end of working hours, the receptionist would go home and all subsequent calls would be attended by a security guard who would ask the customer to call back during working hours the next day. This way the dealer would perhaps miss out on many sales leads and customers would end up going through a tedious process.
With a cloud-based system, each call lands in the cloud and is picked up throughout the day. The customer is prompted to input his or her choice and is routed to the relevant department. "If a lead comes from south Bangalore, the system figures out the location and routes it to a sales agent in south Bangalore," said Ozonetel's founder Murthy Chintalapati. All the hardware associated with traditional telephony can be done away with using softphones, hosted interactive voice response systems and other web-based solutions.
Total cost of ownership will reduce by 80%, claims Murthy whose firm is expecting a four-fold growth by year end. Building your own telephone system is not only a few clicks away but also offers the convenience of paying only for what you use. "Upfront costs of setting up a call centre is almost zero," says Sridharan of Exotel . His cloud telephony startup which recently raised Rs 2.5 crore from Mumbai Angels, counts chartered accountants, doctors and many small businesses as its clients.
The company was born when one of the co-founders Shivakumar Ganesan, former products and technology head at Flipkart , built a solution that's capable of answering all the calls that came his way. A company like Zipdial, which creates technology-linked marketing solutions for brands like Kotak Mahindra Bank and Disney, handles anywhere between half-a-million to two million calls a day.
One of the most successful products of Zipdial uses Kookoo to connect consumers and brands by tapping missed calls. The product has been gaining attention from large brands too. "We source infrastructure directly from telecom operators. Ozonetel is the layer between the infrastructure and the Zipdial platform," says ZipDial CEO Valerie Rozycki Wagoner.
Plivo is another framework which allows you to build telephony systems using the Web. It was developed by two entrepreneurs , Michael Ricordeau and Venky B, who found that creating telephony applications was a painful task. "We provide interfaces to developers and businesses to design anything from an IVR to a call center," Venky told ET.
Nearly four-million minutes of telephone calls pass over solutions built by Plivo every month with clients in the US and India. Telephony is a huge problem in India, says Ambarish Gupta, founder and CEO of Knowlarity, a company backed by private equity firm Sequoia. "Everyone has telephone but it is not intelligent," he added. "If you combine cloud computing and telephony growth, it becomes a very powerful tool.
I think there are a couple of billiondollar companies to be built out of this opportunity ," said Gupta. "Cloud telephony makes sense for small companies presently ," says Sanish. Large firm's needs may not be serviced by cloud telephony at present, he points out. But as the market matures and large vendors become active, big firms will also move to a hybrid model leveraging cloud and traditional telephony, he says.
-TOI
The project manager at Grameen Foundation India, Kamalika Sen, is trying to better medical treatment by reaching out to patients through an interactive voice response system hosted on the Internet. Through the system, patients are reminded of their medication timings and given health tips.
"For patients on regulated medication, this is our application," says Sen who is heading a pilot called Motech. Patients can also give health-related information that can be reviewed by physicians later. A few years back, it would have been wellnigh impossible to create such a system without spending lakhs to procure hardware, hiring people to configure the system or paying for the phone lines that are idle except when the scheduled calls are made.
Things have significantly eased thanks to a set of cloud telephony firms, which sit between the telecom infrastructure provider and the consumer providing web-based easy-to-use telephony solutions - hosted on the cloud and served on a pay-per-use basis. This implies that customers will not have to buy and manage expensive telephone infrastructure.
Not only not-for-profit organisations, but even small and medium companies are embracing cloud telephony to give business a price edge. The Grameen Foundation India is one of the many users of Ozonetel, the cloud telephony company whose interface was used to create Motech. Bigger customers of the company include Zipdial and Hyundai Trident, a leading Bangalore dealer of the Korean automaker. Ozonetel offers Kookoo, a programming interface through which users can build applications like interactive voice recording systems and create outbound campaigns.
At least six to seven startups are trying to disrupt a hardware- and cost-intensive business by offering such services. "The technology people use now is from the seventies, but the world has moved on," says Ishwar Sridharan, co-founder of Exotel, a startup based on cloud telephony. The Bangalore company makes it easy to create applications like intelligent call routing and voice response systems by offering a dragand-drop Web interface.
These companies also aggregate infrastructure by buying telephone lines and bandwidth from operators and offering it on the tap to buyers who sign up. Clients are typically small and medium firms or individuals who can not afford expensive telephony equipment. "Small and medium businesses are looking to grow and having a professional telephony system has become a part of it -- like having a website," says KB Sanish, an analyst at Gartner.
A typical example of how cloud telephony can help businesses is playing out at Hyundai Trident. The dealer network with about 14 branches in the city had a private branch exchange installed at each branch. A receptionist had to man the telephones in each branch and route the call to the relevant person based on the customer's need.
At the end of working hours, the receptionist would go home and all subsequent calls would be attended by a security guard who would ask the customer to call back during working hours the next day. This way the dealer would perhaps miss out on many sales leads and customers would end up going through a tedious process.
With a cloud-based system, each call lands in the cloud and is picked up throughout the day. The customer is prompted to input his or her choice and is routed to the relevant department. "If a lead comes from south Bangalore, the system figures out the location and routes it to a sales agent in south Bangalore," said Ozonetel's founder Murthy Chintalapati. All the hardware associated with traditional telephony can be done away with using softphones, hosted interactive voice response systems and other web-based solutions.
Total cost of ownership will reduce by 80%, claims Murthy whose firm is expecting a four-fold growth by year end. Building your own telephone system is not only a few clicks away but also offers the convenience of paying only for what you use. "Upfront costs of setting up a call centre is almost zero," says Sridharan of Exotel . His cloud telephony startup which recently raised Rs 2.5 crore from Mumbai Angels, counts chartered accountants, doctors and many small businesses as its clients.
The company was born when one of the co-founders Shivakumar Ganesan, former products and technology head at Flipkart , built a solution that's capable of answering all the calls that came his way. A company like Zipdial, which creates technology-linked marketing solutions for brands like Kotak Mahindra Bank and Disney, handles anywhere between half-a-million to two million calls a day.
One of the most successful products of Zipdial uses Kookoo to connect consumers and brands by tapping missed calls. The product has been gaining attention from large brands too. "We source infrastructure directly from telecom operators. Ozonetel is the layer between the infrastructure and the Zipdial platform," says ZipDial CEO Valerie Rozycki Wagoner.
Plivo is another framework which allows you to build telephony systems using the Web. It was developed by two entrepreneurs , Michael Ricordeau and Venky B, who found that creating telephony applications was a painful task. "We provide interfaces to developers and businesses to design anything from an IVR to a call center," Venky told ET.
Nearly four-million minutes of telephone calls pass over solutions built by Plivo every month with clients in the US and India. Telephony is a huge problem in India, says Ambarish Gupta, founder and CEO of Knowlarity, a company backed by private equity firm Sequoia. "Everyone has telephone but it is not intelligent," he added. "If you combine cloud computing and telephony growth, it becomes a very powerful tool.
I think there are a couple of billiondollar companies to be built out of this opportunity ," said Gupta. "Cloud telephony makes sense for small companies presently ," says Sanish. Large firm's needs may not be serviced by cloud telephony at present, he points out. But as the market matures and large vendors become active, big firms will also move to a hybrid model leveraging cloud and traditional telephony, he says.
-TOI
