'3G will come in two flavours in India'

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: These are both exciting and interesting times for people in the communications domain. And Oracle Communications, global business unit senior vice-president and general manager Bhaskar Gorti is having a good time facilitating the technological change across the media and communications space. He moved to Oracle after heading Portal Software as its CEO for four years when Oracle acquired Portal in 2006. At Oracle, Gorti looks after strategic planning, product development, sales, service and support for Oracle’s Communications products. In an interview with Surabhi Agarwal, Gorti outlines the changes, challenges and commerce that 3G will bring in the country. Excerpts:

The department of telecom has recently released its guidelines for 3G in India. What potential does 3G unleash for companies like Oracle?

The potential is huge. We have been providing technologies to global operators to rollout 3G whether it is in Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Western Europe or Northern America. These markets have saturated in terms of new subscribers, so they have to rollout new things. We see a lot of opportunity as markets open up. In India, 3G is going to come in two different flavours. Firstly, existing operators with 2G or 2.5G technology are going to upgrade to 3G. And secondly, many new operators and some foreign players are also going to enter the market with 3G. Everybody knows that per minute revenue on voice services will go down and that from value added services (VAS) will increase. We designed our billing and rating and revenue management platform for VAS 5-10 years ago. We had designed these platforms for real-time, IP and internet. Those days, you couldn’t guess what somebody might use it for. So, we have built our system with those fundamentals.

How can operators upgrade their tech platform from 2G to 3G?