Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company, Telstra, has entered into a joint venture with Microland, a specialist information technology (IT) infrastructure services provider with operation hub in India, to provide international and national long distance telephone and internet services. Telstra International's Director, global products and marketing, Nathan Bell, speaks to Neena Bhandari from Singapore about the company’s India plan. Edited excerpts:
Why did Telstra choose to enter the Indian market at this juncture?
Telstra has reintegrated assets back into the Telstra International business, because of which, we have now got significant cable and infrastructure in other countries. One of the countries where Telstra International actually didn't have a full set of licences was India.
To serve our customers on an end-to-end basis, we needed the international long distance, national long distance and internet service provider licences. So, though it was a late venture for Telstra into India, it was actually a part of our overall timeline progressing to the point that now we've integrated the assets and have the licences. The next step is deployment and setting up of our network.
What plans do you have for the Indian market?
We are targeting a number of key verticals at Telstra International. The primary concern would be to serve Australian multi-national companies who are expanding more into Asia. Definitely, there is a large Indian component to that. We are also focusing on a number of key verticals in the space of financial and professional services, media and content, mining and resource and facilitating the requirements of other carriers internationally or in the region. In India, we plan to begin with the seven big cities — Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune — and continue to expand that coverage. We want to capture the requirements of more complex solutions.
We have a significant amount of capacity in India through the various cable systems we own. Our goal is to make sure we can help our customers leverage that infrastructure in the most effective way and continue to support the growing needs of our customers across that suite of services.
How competitive will your prices be to make a dent in what is already a very robust market?
I guess, being a late entrant, gives us the chance to compare the competitive rates based on what we have been working. This has put Telstra in a very strong position and ensures that we have diversity across the sites right down to the physical cable level. Combining the knowledge about the market and the fact that we are leveraging Telstra's own submarine cable capacity, makes us very confident that we will be competitive from day one.
Would you employ people in India? How many?
Yes, we are hiring, but can't tell you the exact number. We are hiring product and marketing managers, sales and pre-sales people, customer service people and operations and field services staff. We want our core people in each of the core cities. Since Mumbai and Chennai are our core gateways into and out of India, a number of our service staff will be based there. As our customer needs continue to expand and the complexities grow, we will seek to add more people.
This is the first step in a elaborate journey. In the next eight weeks, we will announce the new services we would launch.
What kind of investment will you make in India?
We are investing in back-hall infrastructure, intra country infrastructure in terms of network capacity, co-location infrastructure and a full suite of platforms that we are building right from IPL EPL — bandwidth type services — through managed services such as VPN and VoIP and then moving forward into value-add services.
Our investments here are a part of the growth strategy. We have to make sure that across all markets in Asia we have a common set of licenses that gives us a local contracting and building capability. It provides our customers with a consistent service approach and experience whether they are business based in India, expanding out across Asia or coming into Asia from Europe and US.
Will we witness any advertising campaign in the coming weeks?
We are not really looking at a consumer play here. We will run an awareness programme in terms of being able to articulate and demonstrate what Telstra can do both for businesses originating from India. We see India as a big investment market for a lot of businesses; so, it's about driving awareness of how we are going to best serve those customers.
Will Microland take care of the infrastructure?
The infrastructure will be managed by our service staff in India, leveraging the tools platform from our operation centres in other parts of the world. We already have a very successful infrastructure management team located across the globe. We are adding the resources to that in India to make sure we are closest to customers and our suppliers.
Why did you choose Microland?
Microland and Telstra actually have a history together. Microland supports some of our customers’ remote management and likewise we are engaged with them with some of our IT services. I guess, there was an almost natural willingness to see how we can partner up from that perspective.
