Prateek Pashine, president-SME Business, Tata Teleservices talks to Heena Jhingan about a plethora of ways in which service providers can build on their enterprise offerings and provide value to the SME buyer. Excerpts…
How has your SME business grown over the last couple of years?
Around 30% of our SME revenues come from the non-mobility services. The SME market is a big focus area for us and we are witnessing tremendous growth. In the past few years, while the industry grew at 9%, we grew at 15% and are now looking at 20% growth for FY 2013-14. We believe that our SME business is uniquely positioned to deliver a completely managed service to SMEs including storage and data management, software upgrading, backup and on-demand applications in a completely resilient and secure environment.
In most cases, the generic enterprise services are down sized or tweaked as SME offering, but that is not what they want. How do you think you differ here from rest of the solution providers targeting SME space?
We have a dedicated team that creates products and services keeping SME customers in mind and to support that, we have a dedicated SME business organisation that caters to this growing segment. We have introduced many products for this segment including the first-of-its kind SIP Trunk services for SMEs, wherein they can make full use of their installed telephone exchanges with SIP trunk. This allows the latter to replace traditional fixed lines with single physical connectivity from the service provider network. This single link can scale from a minimum of 20 to 1,500 voice channels. It helps an enterprise have significant cost-savings for things like installation, maintenance and hardware upgrades.
Our understanding of the market has consistently evolved and offers us great competitive advantage. SME is still a large untapped area for telcos and requires special attention. We are planning to actively engage SMEs through our advisory services, specialised teams and a comprehensive product portfolio to further increase our revenues from the vertical. We have around thousand dedicated people within the company serving only SME clients, and no other telco across India has that kind of dedicated approach for SMEs. Combined with our range of end-to-end product offerings, we believe we are significantly ahead.
Industry reports indicate that the big opportunity of growth for cellular operators lies with SMEs that are going to get contracts from bigger agencies and projects like APDRP etc., that will involve bringing in automation and mobility. How are you trying to tap this opportunity?
We agree that enterprise mobility is dramatically changing the face of business operations today. The impact of enterprise mobility can be gauged from the fact that its benefits transcend the business-to-employee (B2E), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) gamut of any enterprise. For instance, on the B2C side of a business’ operations, it is possible to sell goods to customers directly via smartphones, wherein social media usage is being increasingly leveraged on, to smartly target customers based on their online and mobile activities and e-commerce is steadily giving way to m-commerce.
At Tata Teleservices, we are poised to help our SME customers with our unique set of end-to-end products and solutions, to enable them to become leaner and agile and compete in a dynamic and hyper-competitive environment.
Many cellular operators in the country are trying to tap the enterprise business with innovations around location based and machine to machine applications. What is the scope of such applications for SMEs and what has been their response to such services from you?
The wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) market is increasingly growing across the world and in India too, and covers a wide range of applications such as remote management, automotive, metering, industrial data collection and healthcare. M2M is already enabling devices such as PoS terminals, ATMs and ticketing machines.
We at Tata Teleservices are focused on creating solutions for our SME customers and already offer tracking services to them. We offer an array of various Smart Grid solutions useful for the day to day routine tasks like Smart Personal Car Tracking solutions, Smart School Bus Tracking solutions, Smart Task Mobile applications and Smart Retail Car Tracking solutions. Furthermore, there are also intelligent meter reader and cab management services which are currently functional in various parts of the country.
The intent from our end is to create an end-to-end ecosystem with partners who come with right experience and mindset. Our approach is vertical centric which will help us solve real business issue rather than creating a “me too” kind of service.
