point

December - 2013 - issue > STARTUP of the year 2013

Cognitel: Leveraging Education and Consulting Services to the ICT Industry

Nandini Mukherjee
Monday, December 9, 2013
Nandini Mukherjee
The Telecom Services Industry in India is dominated by the likes of Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Reliance on the service provider side and by Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei and IBM on the Infrastructure side. The total value of the industry is pegged between $45-50 billion and employs between 2.5 to 3.0 million people. While the market is currently dealing with a regulatory environment that has been challenging in the last few years, the service providers and OEMs have constantly reinvented themselves to suggest that the industry is poised for stellar growth in the future.

A group of highly recognized and respected professionals who held leadership positions in organizations like IBM and Nokia sensed the market conditions and founded Cognitel, a Telecom and IT services company with specialization in consulting, training and research . Cognitel was created with a vision to create a world class workforce for the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry across all levels in an organization.

"Our team of consultants and educators is drawn from the some of the best names in the industry such as IBM, Ericsson, Nokia and Accenture and continues to contribute thought-capital to the industry. Our clients depend on us to provide relevant and lasting solutions to real life problems in order to keep them at the forefront of offering high end technology services," says Kabra, Director and CEO of Cognitel.

Building an Efficient Team

Since inception, Cognitel's mission was to provide uncompromising quality of education which meant focus on three basic things; creating rich in-house developed content, inducting and developing consultants to deliver this content and building an infrastructure that can be used to provide real life experience to learners. To embark on this ambitious journey, Cognitel's challenge was to be able to attract capital and talent. India lacks availability of educators that have prior industry experience and who can bring that experience to educate others. So Kabra and his co-founder Jain built their team by recruiting people from the industry who had good field experience and coached them to become proficient trainers or consultants. The team worked relentlessly to create content in various domains such as technology planning, deployment, operations and management incorporating their domain knowledge and problem solving experience.


Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook