At Xius, we've an integrated offering ready to enable VNOs

With over two decades of IT and telecom industry experience behind him, GV Kumar, the founder and CEO of Xius, a telecom technology product company, has come up with an innovative consortium approach to enable the companies applying for Virtual Network Operator (VNO) license in India, after the sector was thrown open earlier in 2016 to fast track Digital India mission. At the Xius Global Delivery Center in Hyderabad, Telangana, in an interview with Voice&Data, Kumar elaborates on how Xius is enabling VNO aspirants and contributing to the VNO ecosystem in India.

Voice&Data: Tell us about Xius, its focus and what you are trying to achieve in India market?

GV Kumar: Xius started as a telecom software products company and remains so till date. All our products are based on intellectual property (IP) generated at Xius. We have filed over 120 patent applications. Our first product in 2000 was enabling roaming on pre-paid SIM. At that point of time, this service enabling realtime authentication on pre-paid SIM, was not available anywhere in the world. We invented a new method to enable this – here in India. The first call was made between Mumbai and Pune. Innovation is the DNA of Xius. Our philosophy is to bring about a fundamental change in the delivery of telecommunication services to subscribers.

Next, Xius developed a pre-paid core billing platform and went to market with it winning tenders… Our customer base included MTNL, Vodafone, Aircel, and RPG among others.

In 2004, Xius was merged with Megasoft, the IT services company. (Both the companies have a common investor Peepul Capital, formerly iLabs and Kumar at the helm.) After expanding first five years in India market and then having the access to US market post-merger with Meagsoft, in 2005-06, we realized that value size of deals for our platforms were five-six times larger in US market as compared to India, which was a low paying market. Even though India telecom subscriber base was literally booming post 2005 we turned our focus on western markets for better returns and by 2009, 90% of our revenues were coming from the US… It is only recently with the India market opening up for VNOs, we have started looking at the India opportunity.

Voice&Data: So, how are you going about tapping the India opportunity?