'Value to customer' is the mantra Ajay Waghray swears by everyday in his work. And why not, as the CIO of Verizon Wireless, his primary job is to focus on the prime technology that will help solve customer problems and add value to their everyday operations. “I always believe that it is a tripod that one has to balance. If you have the three legs of the tripod - customers, employees, and shareholders - balanced, you are in the right path,” says Waghray.

‘Customer’ - the Magic Word

For him, it is all about creating ‘customer centric innovation’ that improves the quality of experience and products for the customers and productivity for the employees. That is exactly what he is trying to create in Verizon Wireless today. Be it the fourth generation technology for LCD TV that it is developing and testing in two markets with Vodafone to enable high definition viewing of games and videos; improving the network that leverages the user experience while accessing the Internet over smart devices like PDA; making systems that are smarter and personalized to the individual channel and customers by integrating business intelligence to the current technology revolutions; or just helping customers access and maintain all the data that is available today, Waghray is striving to ensure that Verizon is out there leading the next wave of innovation for its customers and revolutionizing the industry.

And to achieve this, the company has begun to embrace open source applications and devices that can be quickly integrated into its operating environments and be consumed by the customers in a machine-to-machine open world. The recently launched developer’s community and the joint innovation lab with China Mobile, Vodafone, and other partners to create Web widgets and machine-to-machine applications are among its steps towards realizing this.

“Today, Verizon is penetrating in new verticals such as healthcare and utility industries. Anything from e-readers to utility devices that measure the oil levels in turbines to diagnostic instruments in hospitals, we want to innovate things that can be integrated into the ecosystem again so that they cater to our customers within and also their end customers. For example, a utility company should be able to use Verizon’s products not only for its customers but also within its own organization for the benefit of the employees,” Waghray says. It is a case of B2B2C and B2B2E kind of ecosystem that he wants Verizon to create and support.