Current investment is holding companies back from infrastructure sharing

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How do you see managed services market during the recession in India?
The recession is going to help the industry grow. Enterprises have become more conscious of their spending on IT and telecom solutions, but we see a bigger opportunity as companies are looking at network consolidation. Multiple IT services, resilient networks and the use of MPLS help costs to come down. There is a lot of interest from corporates for MPLS. As a company, our results are healthy and show no sign of recession. In fact, we've had a very successful H1 results last year.

Sunanda Das
managing director
Cable&Wireless India

How do you cater to the needs of your customer base in India?
We have nine modes in India and six cable systems. If one fails the others can be used, but we never have had a situation where all modes and systems have gone down. We work with more than 150 multinational and local customers in India-amongst them include half of the top fifteen IT/ITeS companies in India. We're witnessing strong growth in verticals such as IT/ITeS which has been our strongest focus so far, followed by BFSI. New verticals like retail, and healthcare, media, and entertainment are also picking up momentum in the market.

What are your future plans to leverage the opportunity available in the Indian market?
When we looked at our customer base, we find that a couple of years ago we had 30,000 customers. We dropped 80% of them and took a strategic decision to transfer them to someone else which resulted in negative pressure for us. Today, we have reached 6,000 customers, who are happy with us and are growing. Our plan is not to increase by 2,500. Rather, we would like to stay focused and grow within these accounts.

What has been your investment strategies so far?
We have invested more than $30 mn in our network across India, to support our customers, and their growth and expansion across the region. The company has also invested in initiatives such as the 'Europe India Gateway Consortium'. Recently, we signed a MoU with BSNL that will enable us to have an extended coverage across India for providing resilient solutions for last mile connectivity.

Is sharing of infrastructure gaining momentum among players?
We are partnering with BSNL whereby we can use each other's infrastructure facilities. Moving to IP, people have already invested in the equipment but they have not got full returns. Current investment is holding companies back from infrastructure sharing. Our understanding is that investment is holding these companies back, and therefore, they are not sharing the network.

Kannan K
kannan@cybermedia.co.in