How Efficient Network Operation Benefited Ericson

The company’s Network Operation Center (NOC) which manages back-end services for a host of telecom operators was structured on a robust IT framework but run by a non-IT team. While it was a critical revenue generator for the business, the IT processes that ran it needed to be revamped. “The business was not in control of the NOC's IT costs and the processes. Reports on uptime and downtime weren’t being generated and this was affecting performance,” explains Chakravorty. But when you have Chakravorty on board, there are fewer reasons to worry. Being an avid footballer, strategic planning comes naturally to him. He realized that, “We were running two IT teams for essentially the same end user. My WAN team was internally doing for Ericsson what the NOC was doing for telecom operators,” he says.

So, he went to the business with a proposition: open a new, distinct business unit to which he would transfer his 13-man WAN team and add seven people from the NOC team. “The business knows telecom; I know IT. We needed to merge the two,” says Chakravorty. Giving shape to his strategy, the company opened a new unit and called it the Enteprise NOC (eNOC). “I avoided the whole rigmarole of recruiting people and rebuilding the IT processes,” he says. But there was a catch to this plan. How would the business extract the cost of running the new unit from the operators? Chakravorty devised a strategy to counter that too: issue a purchase order to the NOC, buy the services of the IT team from the NOC and pass on those costs to the operators. Today, with Chakravorty’s strategy, eNOC has helped Ericsson scale up and sell its services to a whole new bunch of networks. From 12-18 months earlier, it can now transition its activities in less than six months.

The Person Behind It

Tamal Chakravorty

CIO, Ericsson

The business knows telecom; I know IT. We needed to merge the two