Virgin Mobile India Limited, New Delhi, Delhi, India
Founded in the spring of 2008, the Virgin Mobile India brand is India’s first national, youth-focused mobile service. With presence now across 45,000 outlets, Virgin Mobile India reaches over 320,000 cities, towns and villages across India.
The Virgin Mobile branded services are offered to Indian consumers by Tata Teleservices through a brand franchise with Virgin Mobile. Virgin Mobile provides the expertise and marketing of the brand while Tata Teleservices operates the network infrastructure.
The parent company, Virgin Mobile, is one of the world’s most recognized brands. The organization was the world’s first Mobile Virtual Network Operator when it launched in the UK in 1998. Conceived in 1970 by Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin Mobile Group has gone on to grow very successful businesses in sectors ranging from mobile telephony, transportation, travel, financial services, leisure, music, holidays, publishing and retailing. Virgin Mobile has created more than 200 branded companies worldwide, employing approximately 50,000 people in 29 countries. Its revenues around the world in 2006 exceeded £10 billion (approximately $20 billion.)
In 2007, just one year before the official launch of Virgin Mobile India, the group’s operations, project, IT and logistics managers began to notice a significant increase in travel. With prime operations in Mumbai and New Delhi, the one-way trip of 1400 kilometers was costly and time-consuming -- two hours by plane or the cheaper alternative, an overnight journey by train.
With frequent operational meetings becoming more and more vital to the success of the organization, the need for a more scalable alternative to travel quickly arose. Developers and project teams needed a way to communicate face-to-face in real-time without the expense or delay of being there in-person.
Virgin Mobile India needed a cost-effective collaborative communication tool that provided exceptional audio and video quality at very low bandwidths as many regions in India have a maximum upload limit of 512Kbps. The tool would also need to integrate with existing UC products.
Virgin Mobile India’s key needs included:
“LifeSize is very simple, a complete value with great quality -- it’s the ideal solution for conferencing.”
– Sanjay Singh, General Manager of Operations, Virgin Mobile India
After evaluating the different video communications products on the market, LifeSize was brought into the Mumbai office for an initial demo of the product.
“The offering from LifeSize was quickly chosen for its incredible quality, ease of integration and price-performance,” said Sanjay Singh, General Manager of Operations for Virgin Mobile India.
LifeSize® Room™ HD video systems were soon implemented among Virgin Mobile India’s various corporate offices in Mumbai and New Delhi. The LifeSize Room system’s built-in multiway bridge allows callers to establish video calls with multiple participants through an embedded high definition multipoint control unit (MCU). 6-way Continuous Presence (with 4 visible participants), complete with transcoding was an ideal fit for Virgin Mobile India as multiple teams in multiple locations needed to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily.
Culturally, the LifeSize system implementation was quickly accepted. As a statistically younger workforce working for a cool, youth-focused brand, the promise of HD video conferencing was certainly intriguing. However, Singh says that there were a few skeptics in the mix.
“Some people said it wouldn’t work, that we couldn’t achieve good, crisp quality resolutions at low bandwidths like 512Kbps,” he said. “But once we experienced a DVD-quality (848x480) LifeSize call at that rate, we were all soon believers.”
Since the LifeSize implementation, Virgin Mobile India has seen increased productivity, reductions in travel and travel-related costs as well as increased face-to-face communication among all groups within the organization.
“I never expected it to be so mission critical,” Singh said. “From product management to marketing and IT, everyone uses LifeSize and it’s been an invaluable tool for us.”
Virgin Mobile India has reduced travel by 20% since implementing LifeSize. Just by travel savings alone, they realized their ROI in just six months.
“LifeSize is very simple,” Singh said, “a complete value with great quality -- it’s the ideal solution for conferencing. We’ve received excellent on and off site support with LifeSize. They have a technically sound team to quickly fix issues and the product compatibility with other leading applications allows for easy integration.”
As for future growth, Virgin Mobile India plans to expand operations from 15 offices in region to 25 over the next 2 years. As for the future of the conferencing deployment at Virgin Mobile India, Singh and his team plan to expand their LifeSize network to meet their rapid growth.
“Video conferencing has excellent potential in India,” he said. “Video has found its place in basic infrastructure setup for virtually any corporation, which was not the case five years ago. We are excited to be at the forefront in implementing this vital technology in India.”
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