Virtue Insight: Telecom - Past Conferences

Mobile VAS Summit 2009 - September 23, 24 2009, ITC Sheraton, New Delhi, India

“Identifying & evaluating the successful growth strategies & the future directions for VAS”

Key Themes discussed at this conference:

Examining the innovative VAS services which are appealing to Indian consumers.

Grabbing the 3G opportunity: regulation, network deployment, business models

Business applications: Best practices, service offerings & deployment

Global marketing strategies in order to incite the user to use advanced data services.

Strategies on boosting the penetration of mobile VAS usage in smaller cities and rural areas.

What is the potential for mobile content and entertainment in India?

Exploiting the opportunities created by technology convergence

Positioning yourself in light of new market entries

Analyzing the worldwide trends in VAS & the lessons for India.

What is the role of mobile operators in delivering mobile content?

VAS as a contrivance for improving customer & brand loyalty.

Increasing ARPU with value added services, entertainment and content

Areas to be focused by network equipment vendors to tune themselves in the Indian environment.

Expectations from handset manufacturers for introducing innovative mobile VAS service offerings.

Role of the regulators and their impact in the region

Reviewing the revenue generating models in mobile internet, advertising, games, LBS, entertainment and banking

Key Speakers:

NK. Goyal, President, Communications & Manufacturing Association of (CMAI)

Suresh Jayaraju, Stratergic partner development manager, Google

L.V. Sastry, Vice President & Head, Bharti Airtel

Deval Parikh, Chief officer Handsets, VAS & procurement, Virgin Mobile

Harbinder Narula, Vice President - India & Middle East, Aryty(Former Head of content Acquisitions & Partnerships, Google)

Sunzay Passari, Vice President - VAS, Content & Devices, Essar Teleholdings & BPL Mobile Communications

Satyen Gupta, Chief Regulatory Advisor, BT Global Services-SAARC Region

Sandeep Keshkar, DGM(NSS) Services, MTNL

Pradeep Dwivedi, Sr. Vice President - Marketing & Product Management, Tata Teleservices

Jasmeet Gandhi, Head - Services - Marketing and Devices, Nokia

Anuraj Gambhir, Head – Multimedia Strategy & Innovation, Ericsson

Neeraj Sonker, Vice President, Tata Communications

Ilango Periathambi, Director Pre - Sales, Bay Talkitec

Li Weiming, Head of Product Sales, APAC, Comverse

Suresh Kumar, Head - New business initiatives, Netxcell

Sanjay Sakalley, Director / COO, Diginatives

Amit Mehta, Head sales & Marketing - VAS, SDP & Mobility Solutions, TCS

Sanjay Tripathi, UIDG, Tech Mahindra

Sridhar T. Pai, CEO, Tonse Telecom

Conference Summary:

Mobile Value Added service is now-a-days generating great revenues in India. Presently in today’s scenario Mobile VAS accounts for 10% of the operator’s revenue. And therefore in this regard, Virtue Insight has organized a two day VAS summit to identify and evaluate the successful strategies for future direction for Mobile VAS that kicked off at ITC Sheraton Hotel yesterday.

The summit started with a chair opening remarks by Mr. N. K. Goyal, President, Communications & Manufacturing Association of India (CMAI). He presided over the chair by talking about the strength and weaknesses of MVAS.

“India being the 2nd largest in Telecom Industry in the world, we are going to see exposure in VAS. CMAI is contributed to growth of VAS by virtue of more than 130 MOU partners. And it is obviously a good step by Virtue Insight”, says Mr. Goyal while interacting with Media Mughals.

The session was next taken over by Mr. Suresh Jayaraju, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google. He talked about VAS and mobile internet, its scenario in today’s market, and about its conflict and convergence.

“It’s a good event and interesting to share thoughts with people around. Mobile internet and video calls are having good growth. I think we are going through a very interesting phase and this summit is playing a key role in gathering mobile into an open platform”, cited Mr. Suresh.

The summit continued with many other key speakers like Raghunath Vijyaaraghavan, Director Marketing, Bay Talkitec; Krishna Basudevan, Aircel; Neeraj Sonekar, VP, Wireless Engineering and Implementation, Tata Communication; Sunzay Passri, VP-VAS Content and Device, Essar Technologies & BPL Mobile Communications, etc.

Li Weiming, Head of Product sales, APAC, Comverse talked about maximizing business performance & customer value through VAS. After the speaking session, while talking to Media Mughals, he expressed his views by saying that, “This is a very good step to have this summit and it is really an important topic especially with the innovation and challenges everybody is facing to stay ahead in this competitive scenario.” He further says that, “In terms of Comverse, I believe to have a holistic approach rather than having an individual VAS product. There should be one common platform.”

The overall event gathered representatives from leading Wireless Operators, Handset Manufacturers, Content Developers and other related industries.

Conference Testimonial:

It was a pleasure to share insights at the Mobile VAS Summit 2009 and learn and interact with other speakers and attendees. The debate between operators and other entities in the VAS value chain was pretty interesting - Deepak Halan, Group Business Director, eTech Group - Telecom & e-governance Practice, IMRB International

Conference Sponsors:

Gold Sponsor