The Hindu Business Line : Tata Indicom Enterprise plans presence in US, UK

THE Tata Indicom Enterprise Business Unit (TIEBU) — set up as a common sales and marketing front for five telecom and Internet services companies of the Tata group - is now planning to extend its presence to the US, the UK and South-East Asia, possibly in Singapore or Hong Kong.

TIEBU, which is meant to integrate the five companies' services for corporate clients, already has 550 corporate accounts in the country and has brought in revenues of Rs 511 crore for the five, said Mr Sandeep Mathur, President, TIEBU.

"Many of our top MNC clients such as Goldman Sachs and Microsoft have their decision centres abroad. When it comes to establishing networking circuits between offices in their own country and India, we often get only the Indian half-circuit of the business with another telecom company in their country standing to get the other half-circuit. We are aiming to influence the decision making there so that we too can make a bid for those half-circuits," said Mr. Mathur.

The general market image of TIEBU is that of a nebulous entity which duplicates the efforts of the individual Tata companies whose major clients are Tata group companies themselves. "Only 5 per cent of the business that TIEBU has procured comes from the Tata group," said Mr Mathur.

TIEBU is also going to present a common customer service interface for its constituent companies - Tata Teleservices Ltd. (TTSL), Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Ltd (TTML), VSNL, Tata Internet and TataNet (a V-SAT company).

Of the 133 employees at TIEBU, over half are "account managers" who are usually located wherever the client is, and 30 are networking solution architects. Some domain experts from industry verticals have been hired as well.

"We not only do customised telecom solutions, but also come up with ideas for our constituent companies," said Mr Mathur. One idea consists of a digital video-camera mounted on a police van and connected to police headquarters by means of CDMA technology from TTSL.

"If successful, we have lakhs of police stations in the country as our potential clients," said Mr Mathur. "And we have a dozen such ideas that are being worked upon."

TIEBU also introduced "Voice Minutes" an extension of IPLC where the customer pays "as-per-usage" and does not have to lease an entire circuit when he does not need one.

"Our account managers find out what the needs are and we have our solution architects doing the rest."