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| Edited By: OP Thomas |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 21, 2018, 03:20 AM IST
Why shift the focus to the enterprise space?
There is a 'digital disruption' at the moment where the traditional brick-and-mortar has been replaced by virtual offices like Amazon. Under such a shift, capital spends have reduced tremendously and the same business can be conducted now without actually owning stocks or raw materials. In 2016, we see a major transitioning from traditional methods of managing the business to companies using digital technologies across various aspects of their organisation. This is where we come in.
How would you define the enterprise business?
The enterprise segment can be broadly classified into three segments – large enterprise, B2B (small and medium enterprises) and carrier. These categories offer immense growth for us due to telecom convergence to IT. TTSL is tapping the SME telecom market which is estimated to be at Rs 12,800 crore for the current year and poised to grow at a CAGR of 8.8% or Rs 19,600 crore by FY20.
Tata Teleservices trades below Rs 8. Is that why the company has entered the IT space?
That share price is of Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) and its operations are restricted. Tata Teleservices, along with Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Limited, has a reach of over 450,000 towns and villages across the country, with a bouquet of telephony services encompassing mobile services, wireless desktop phones and wire line services. There is a convergence now between IT and telecom where the boundaries are getting blurred. With business expansion to multiple cities or even across countries, there is a need to build, manage and scale up requirements at controlled costs and this where we come in. TTSL has now revamped itself to dedicated internet connectivity for businesses, securing internal communications like audio and video and multiple file type transfers via virtual private network. Besides, they have a content delivery network for faster delivery of video websites and live broadcasts. Today, telecom has grown beyond mere communication. You will not see buffering of a video file through this as across geographies the viewer gets networked to the nearest server for seamless viewing. Video streaming is growing at 83% while audio streaming grew 63%.
Are you saying IT department of a corporate is now getting shrunk in size?
Let me put it differently. In the recent past, we have observed a massive shift in decision-makers, who are now heads of various verticals of a corporate like marketing, sales, HR and the likes seeking solutions based on their vertical needs. No more are decisions taken by chief information officer or the IT department of a company as performance improvement has become a key to various vertical heads or profit centres. TTSL, for example, has replaced the multi-wired servers and ports of corporate with a single wire that addresses the usual telecommunication of a large corporate. It's wire line voice portfolio is growing at 15% against the industry growth rate of 1-2% while the managed services is growing at 45% against the industry rate of 25%. The company has already laid down 1.2 lakh kilometres of fibre optic cables across the country and now is in the process of 'fattening' the cables or increasing the bytes. Enterprise growth has been in the region of 11-12%.
