MAM
Infosys wins three awards at Nice comm event
MUMBAI: Infosys, a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and next-generation services, has participation in six of the 32 Catalysts at TM Forum Live – winning three of the seven Catalyst Awards at the annual flagship communications industry event, held in Nice, France. The Awards recognized Infosys’ open innovation to co-create commercially viable prototypes of new digital services and business models.
The three winning Catalysts: A platform for IoT and Anything as a Service: This Catalyst focused on how operators can attract ecosystem partners to co-create new digital services beyond connectivity through the platform business model. Infosys worked with Vodafone and was recognized for its outstanding performance. The focus was on delivering agility, experience and efficiency to communication service providers and exposing TM Forum Open APIs to third party developers to create new revenue streams enabled by network slicing, edge computing and a service marketplace.
“This Catalyst has brought several leading industry players together to show how platform business models together with orchestration and closed-loop assurance can deliver innovative new services and new revenue streams to our industry,” said Dr. Lester Thomas, Chief Systems Architect, Vodafone Group. “Infosys played an invaluable role in the overall architecture, and in particular, defining the Open APIs and contributing enhancements to the Open API programme.”
Joint Agile Delivery – Phase II: In this Catalyst, Infosys was recognized for ‘Outstanding Use’ of TM Forum Assets and worked with AT&T, Orange, Telecom Italia. This Catalyst has been recognized for continuing efforts towards contributing APIs and processes to TM Forum and has a vision for a ‘standardized and platform-based’ approach to developing and delivering world-class software that capitalizes on cross-organizational synergies to dramatically improve time to market, quality and cost.
“Seamless Joint Agile Delivery across complex partner ecosystem is going to be key for rapid service innovation, delivery and operations. Infosys, along with other major industry partners, collaborated on this catalyst to provide a standardized and platform based approach for service validation and service assurance for Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and associated Network Services from different suppliers,” said Michel Valette, Tests and Diagnostics Domain Manager, Orange & Stream Leader, Operations Centre of the Future, TM Forum. “Infosys leveraged their rich capabilities on machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide closed loop adaptive service assurance for dynamic network services coming from different partners.”
Logical Factory: Virtualizing Manufacturing for Agility: This Catalyst, developed with BT, Telecom Italia and TWI, built on a prior award-winning Catalyst – the Smart Industrial Manufacturing: Robots as a Service, which demonstrated the use of TMF’s Open-APIs in the Industrial Internet-of-Things domain to order and configure Robots-as-a-Service. In this enhanced version, the scope was expanded to the entire manufacturing and maintenance process lifecycle. TM Forum recognized this Catalyst project in the category for ‘Outstanding Ecosystem Design’ using CurateFx – TM Forum’s digital ecosystem design and management SaaS solution.
“Infosys’ commendable effort and focus in developing the concept played a key part in the team winning the ‘Outstanding Ecosystem Design Using CurateFx’,” said Darren Williams, Welding Systems Lead, TWI.
Nik Willets, Chief Executive Officer, TM Forum said, “Infosys has made significant investments to enhance its knowledge base in new and emerging technologies. Winning three awards for Catalyst projects proves that Infosys is a knowledge partner capable of defining next-generation products and services for communication service providers. The company is also an early adopter of TM Forum’s Open API initiative.”
Rajesh Krishnamurthy, President and Head of Energy, Utilities, Telecommunications and Services, Infosys said, “Our technology focus and collaboration with like-minded partners is accelerating innovation and delivering results.
AD Agencies
Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
