Nokia gets contract from Airtel for pan-India IVR

New Delhi, Jan 3 (UNI) Nokia Siemens Networks today said it has received a pan-India multi-million euro contract from Bharti Airtel Ltd for deploying its single Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform across 23 circles.

The solution will be ready for commercial operation by April 2008 and is expected to scale up to one billion minutes of usage per month in three years for Bharti Airtel.

The three-year turnkey includes designing, planning, systems integration and optimisation services to enhance overall customer experience.

''This contract further strengthens Nokia Siemens Networks' commitment to enable Bharti Airtel to continuously deliver new services and enhance its customers' mobile experiences,'' Nokia Siemens Head (Sub-region India) Michael Kuehner said.

He said his firm will deploy and integrate the latest platforms to provide a multi-technology, multi-vendor integrated solution that includes systems integration services.

The platforms are HP OCMP (Open Call Management Platform), Video Gateway, Televoting Application and ASR/TTS (Automatic Speech Recognition / Text-to-Speech Engine.

Going forward, voice-based services will be a key revenue generator and service differentiator in the competitive Indian market and Nokia Siemens Networks, with its strong product portfolio and extensive experience, is well positioned to address that need, Mr Kuehner added.

''Our decision to select Nokia Siemens Networks as our partner in this programme is based on their project delivery record,'' Bharti Airtel Ltd President and CEO Manoj Kohli said.

He said the new IVR solution will enable Airtel to deliver services such as Voice SMS, Televoting, Call Management Services (Reach-me service/Missed Call Advisor), Caller Ring back Tone (CRBT) and Voice Portal among others on a faster time-to-market basis, reduce OPEX costs due to optimised network utilisation, and increase security by creation of a layered architecture towards Interactive Voice applications.

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