Changes in the telecom and internet market, including significant competitive and regulatory pressures, are driving business and IT transformation within network service providers worldwide. To overcome these challenges, operators are steering their businesses towards multi-sided, cross industry collaborative models, wherein service providers equipped with the relevant infrastructure and delivery capabilities will provide managed and end-to-end services. The value additive nature of the managed services business renders it less vulnerable to technology upgradation and hence service providers can charge premium value based prices.
Innovative services and solutions across enterprises and service providers’ businesses will help Tata Communications sustain growth in the managed services business. Under the managed services umbrella, the company provides multiple services and solutions like collaboration & unified communication solutions, banking services, media content management and transformational services. It offers live broadcasting and video downloads to the media & entertainment industry with the lowest lag. Similarly, it has dedicated connectivity with financial exchanges, providing banking and financial companies swift connectivity with the lowest lag in transaction orders. This helps garner superior pricing than peers
Wholesale players graduating as cloud enablers
Wholesale connectivity providers are emerging as cloud service enablers where enterprises and consumers are inextricably dependent on a variety of wholesale services that provide connectivity, hosting, interconnectivity and interoperability. Connectivity providers are also developing their own products and applications around the cloud to offer more efficient and customised services.
Increased Focus on Customer Service / XPerience
Wholesalers have realised the importance of enhancing customer experience and are hence sharpening focusing on improving performance in this area. More and more wholesale telecommunications operators are offering customers powerful web portals and automated interfaces to handle routine transactions efficiently and cost-effectively, freeing up staff to deal with more complex and tailored solutions.
Over the past few years, the variety of intermediaries dependent on telecommunications wholesale services like online retailers, online gaming and online video has increased significantly. Unlike traditional internet service providers, these new entrants have little or no expertise and experience in handling complex network and connectivity management systems.
Tata Communications provides unified collaboration and communication (UCC) solutions to enterprises as well as service providers. Services offered under this segment include calling services (enterprise voice, ITFS, IPT), conferencing services (voice, data, web, and video) and hosted contact centre services. Tata Communications launched the RoamPulse platform in February 2015 to provide a real-time roaming intelligence service that allows mobile network operators to improve their customers’ roaming experience and make their business more efficient. Using RoamPulse, telcos can deliver a superior roaming experience to customers by proactively identifying problem areas and reducing the number of service outages.
Due to increased consumption of video content, both at individual and enterprise levels, we believe, Unified Collaboration & Communication along with cloud space would be the main growth driver of the overall managed service business for Tata Communications.