Vodafone India launches super network operating centre in Pune

Achieves 38% reduction in time to restore mobile towers

As part of its global strategy to consolidate its network operation centres, telecommunication services major Vodafone’s India business unit today unveiled its super network operations centre (SNOC) at Pune. This will also allow the company to give end-to-end services for its growing enterprise business.

The centre will provide insight into the working of Vodafone India’s over 120,000 sites that enable network coverage across 22 circles remotely under one roof. The centre spread across 20,000 sq.ft is the result of consolidation of almost 20 network operating centres (NoC) across India, and will house 600 people.

“SNOC has been envisaged a few years ago. It is single source of truth of our network. We had inaugurated this centre in the second quarter of FY12 and have since then built up capabilities and systems. This is the first time that we have brought alive the benefits of telecom and IT convergence in this centre,” said Vishant Vora, director-technology, Vodafone India.

SNOC will allow Vodafone to monitor and service customer complaints on real-time basis. This has meant 20 per cent gain in efficiency, 38 per cent more efficient compared to the other NOCs in India, average 40 per cent reduction in alerts for value added services activation, caller ring back tone, missed call alerts and cell tick services. Vodafone India also announced the opening of its super network experience centre (SNEC) which offers Vodafone’s enterprise customers with business communication solutions. It’s second such centre in India for the enterprise customer. Vodafone will unveil such a centre in Delhi in the next fortnight and a fourth one in Bangalore in a few months. SNEC will leverage the SNOC to serve its enterprise customer as well as this will provide end to end pan India service view through service.

“Four years back we were structured to perhaps deal with corporates in just eight cities. Since then we have worked and scaled our operations and today we have presence in over 200 cities,” said Naveen Chopra, director- Vodafone Business Services.

Chopra says that the Vodafone India has doubled its enterprise revenue in the last four years and also plans to double it further. “Globally enterprise businesses contribution is 20 per cent and that would be the our goal too. But it will take some time to reach that goal,” added Chopra.

Enterprise business that was about 7-7.5 per cent of its India revenues about four years ago, has gone up to 12 per cent at present. He added that the enterprise market in India has been growing at 8 per cent, whereas the company has registered CAGR growth of 20 per cent. Through the SNOC, said Vora, their ability to respond to customers will go up.

“This will be true for both the mobile consumer and enterprises,” he added. For instance, the NOC at present oversees more than 250,000 network elements spanning across IT, enterprise and mobility services. Earlier, Vodafone NOC used to handle 2.7 million alarms. After creating SNOC, it can be reduced to 6,000 actionable tickets using intelligent technologies.