Just under 15 years ago, the Tata Group acquired a 45 per cent stake in Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL). Over the years, the brand has attempted to increase its reach across the world through various acquisitions, including those of Teleglobe and Tyco Global Network, which particularly helped it move beyond its traditional ‘voice’ business. In 2008, Tata Communications was formed from VSNL, VSNL International and Teleglobe coming together.

Sumeet Walia, Global Head – Enterprise Business, Tata Communications, spoke to BusinessLine about growing the brand’s global footprint even as digital disruption kicked off worldwide, and staying relevant to its customers while enterprises everywhere face one common challenge – that of growth.

Since the acquisition of VSNL, what shape has the transformation taken for Tata Communications?

At that point in time, we were largely a single product and single market company. But from 2002 to the current year, our own transformation has been driven by the shifts that have happened in technology, in the markets in which we serve our customers and in the way we strategically wanted to grow as well. Today, 70 per cent of our overall business comes from outside our home market in India. .

Given worldwide disruptions, how exactly has Tata Communications kept up?

Three to four years ago, for example, the enterprise business had started to change across the world.

So while between 2002 and 2006, we were building a network, even acquiring companies, to achieve global size and scale, come 2007 and 2008, we saw that the future is no longer going to be ‘point to point’ and that things will move towards IP.

We began investing heavily in data centres and building an IT backbone for us, and not just in India. And then, we started to establish our capabilities around cloud, security, collaboration and other services.

What have you been able to achieve with just your enterprise-focussed business?

In 2002, there were little to no enterprises that were a part of our customer base. Today, we work with 3,600 enterprise customers and this includes 70 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies.

Around 45 per cent of our enterprise business comes from foreign markets. We also have a 27 per cent market share in India’s enterprise data market. Growth from our cloud, collaboration and security services has touched 40 per cent year-on-year… I would say we’re significantly benefiting from the disruption around digital across the world.

Are there specific sectors driving all this growth for you?

We don’t cover SMB or retail at all, and we’re largely a B2B-focussed enterprise play. But within that universe, ‘digital’ is happening across sectors.

Our conversations with customers have significantly changed over the last 12-18 months. It’s no longer about the internet and connecting offices.

Today, the conversation with CIOs is about how to make their business more agile, more customer centric and how they can deliver a heightened customer experience as well as create greater employee satisfaction for their employees. When the questions are around mobility, cloud or analytics, we fit into all those conversations.

How agile will your own business be in the coming years?

It means disrupting our own business model to get where we want to go. The future will be about scalability, elasticity of demand, a range of platforms, and serving customers in the platform economy. The next 10 years will be about partnerships and an ecosystem of partnerships because they currently drive around 28 per cent growth for our enterprise business.

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