Russian mentality

In the recent news posts of CNews you may find an article
http://telecom.cnews.ru/news/top/index.shtml?2008/12/25/333381
regarding not efficient deployment of CRM in MTS - the biggest Russian MNO. I do not know who is the Customer of the story but results are very clear. MTS bought CRM deployment from its affilated system integrator Kvazar Micro and spent more time and money than usual.

All russian MNOs have affilated partners. In Russia going to the right door (with right partner) is extremly significant. Of course it is the root of many problems with inefficiency but it is so and will be so. Russian businessmens often sick with an idea to make all value generating cycle with their own hands. Is it hard to develop billing for big MNO or gain experience to deploy CRM? Not so hard in Russia :-)

As mentioned in the article MTS often works with affilated Sitronics and Kvazar Micro. Hint: do you understand who is able to push vendor solution to MTS? Yes, companies which closely works with Kvazar and Sitronics. In same time Beeline has much more honest procurement of system integration and solutions and there is no such a lovely partners. Frankly speaking some preferences exist but they are 90% from previous good cooperation experience. Megafon has their good partner Telecom Design.

From VAS point of view MTS is pretty open for Content Providers making direct connections without affilated Content Aggregator. But Beeline and Megafon works through them. Megafon has Incore and all connections (Voice and SMS) are being done through it. Beeline has Temafon for such deals. In this case I think Incore is much more exerienced in VAS area rather than Temafon. That's why Beeline content portal is s ugly. About 4 years ago there was direct Beonlin portal for content providers and situation was much better for Beeline. As result such affilated business bring inefficiency in content VASes and poor VAS offer from MNO.

Thanks,
Denis.