Sridhar Krish Chief Operating Officer, Tikona Infinet Limited
Indian enterprises are increasingly looking at new technologies for the digital enablement of their services and business operations. With the telecom market shifting away from being purely voice-led to becoming data-oriented, operators are formulating various strategies to leverage this enterprise advantage. The large-scale adoption of virtualisation, cloud services, big data analytics and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications has opened up new avenues of growth in this segment. Moreover, as the government’s Digital India and Smart Cities initiatives start gaining traction, the demand for these enterprise-based offerings is expected to increase further. Industry experts share their views on the growing market for enterprise business services (EBS), the current and emerging trends, key challenges and future outlook…
How important is the EBS segment for telecom operators? What are the key opportunities that this segment offers?
Enterprise business-to-business (B2B) services complement the business-to-consumer (B2C) segment of telecom service providers. While telecom operators around the world have built their infrastructure to provide voice and data services to retail customers, EBS has evolved as a separate business unit within telecom companies to meet the specialised voice and data requirements of enterprises. EBS generates high returns on incremental investments by delivering larger capacities and better grade of services for B2B customers. While telcos in India have faced hypercompetition on the consumer side, their enterprise business has retained margins and provided the much-needed support to the overall bottom line.
The increasing demand for the internet has provided the biggest opportunity for the enterprise business segment. Internet penetration in India is very low particularly in small and medium businesses (SMBs). Apart from this, there is a continued demand from medium and large corporates for enterprise-wide MPLS networks. Large corporates have now shifted their focus to increased reliability by aiming at redundancy and high uptime. With the increased dependence of businesses on data networks, chief information officers now have a greater responsibility towards running data networks with zero downtime. Thus, there is a need to increase the availability of MPLS networks that are carrier agnostic both at the core and the access. Moreover, there is a thrust on rural banking and with new banking licences being issued, the banking, financial services and insurance segment remains a key component of MPLS services.
With the increased penetration of smartphones, laptops and handhelds, enterprises are upgrading to wireless local area networks (LANs) to support the bring your own device concept. Managed wireless LANs are emerging as a new segment in line with the increasing demand for high-speed wireless internet access.
What are the current and emerging trends in the adoption of services such as cloud computing, virtualisation, big data analytics and the internet of things?
The demand for these services is directly correlated with the increase in internet penetration, cloud ecosystem maturity, and the overall awareness of cloud services. Even at its current stage of maturity, cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a viable proposition for most enterprises in the SMB segment. Cloud IaaS provides SMBs with access to technologies they would otherwise not be able to afford. Moreover, the Indian SMB market provides a number of opportunities to vendors offering IaaS. Cloud IaaS will complement their current portfolio and offerings, increase bandwidth usage and improve customer stickiness. Cloud-based services in the country will expand in the coming years with the increase in internet penetration, maturity of cloud offerings and awareness, particularly in the SMBs and e-commerce startups that are mushrooming all over India. IoT will require a robust wireless data network in order to offer reliable services. With the increase in 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi network penetration and improved device ecosystem, we will see IoT implementations on a large scale in the next two to three years.
Which enterprise verticals are witnessing a significant adoption of these services? What are the key challenges faced by operators while catering to enterprises?
We see SMBs and e-commerce startups as the biggest drivers of cloud services.
What changes do you see in the EBS scenario as the government’s Digital India and Smart Cities initiatives gain traction?
Service providers will have to work closely with public administrators, system integrators and technology providers to support the Digital India and Smart Cities initiatives. This will require integration capabilities, and the involvement of multiple service providers and technologies.
What are the key challenges faced by operators while catering to these enterprises?
Making the organisation ready to produce and carry huge data volumes at the lowest cost from both mobile and fixed consumers and enterprises is the biggest opportunity as well as challenge for operators today. At present, networks are skewed more towards voice traffic. Their ability to match the exponential growth in internet and data traffic is also a challenge along with building huge optical fibre capacities both in access and core networks. Indian operators need to deploy 10x capacities to match the increased internet usage, and this will require huge investments. In addition, the industry needs to develop a cohesive approach and seek government support for creating simpler right of way solutions and regulations to protect operator investments. Operators should not be required to duplicate investments in laying optical fibre stretches multiple times as this increases costs for end-consumers. We should look for long-term solutions that can sustain us for the next 20-25 years. The industry will benefit from the creation of a common duct infrastructure in all cities and development of duct capacities alongside highways that are easily accessible to all operators. This will eliminate the cost of repeated optical fibre laying, facilitate maintenance and reduce network disruptions.
What is the future outlook for EBS? How can operators leverage these services to drive profitability going forward?
EBS will continue to be a vital part of telco offerings. With increased data capabilities of telecom operators, internet, MPLS networks, wireless LAN services and IoT will become their key offerings with significant revenue potential. Newer access technologies like 4G will enhance the implementation of concepts like telecommuting.
