India Telecom

October 27, 2003
TIEBU clocks Rs 200 crore new order bookings

NEW DElHI -- Tata Indicom Enterprise Business Unit (TIEBU), the specialised enterprise business sales and marketing team for five of the group telecom service providers, has clocked in excess of Rs. 200 crore incremental annualised order bookings in less than 180 days of its existence. Most of these have come from the ITeS, IT and BFSI segments, which together comprise about 75 percent of the incremental revenues.

The largest beneficiary of this achievement is VSNL, with 75 percent of revenues, followed by Tata Teleservices Ltd., Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Ltd., and Tata Internet Services Ltd. Given the success of the concept of having a common group interface for corporate customers, TIEBU's mandate, which until recently covered about 400 key corporate customers, has now been extended to about 550 customers.

Speaking on the achievement, Ajay Pandey, president, TIEBU said: "TIEBU's rapidly increasing stature in the market as a key provider of integrated voice and data solutions to corporate customers has resulted in the company clocking Rs. 200 crore incremental annualised order bookings in less than 180 days. While our revenues have traditionally been from IT and IT enterprise solutions, we have expanded our reach in the market through new channels such as provision of NLD for data and through the development new verticals to suit various customers' need and generate additional revenues.

"We see tremendous growth through our newly-formed government vertical where we shall focus on central government accounts as Defence, Agriculture and Income Tax, etc., that have a pan-India reach and increasing telecom and IT spends. Our offerings through this vertical shall include Internet leased line, VPN, VSAT connectivity for remote locations, etc."

TIEBU was formed this April after the signing of an MoU between VSNL, Tata Teleservices Ltd., Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Ltd., Tata Internet Services Ltd. The TIEBU combine has been recently extended to include Tata Net. TIEBU is now the single point interface through which the five companies deliver telecom services to key enterprise customers across India.

Prior to the formation of TIEBU, the Group's total telecom business from the enterprise space (from customers under TIEBU's purview) was around Rs. 250 crore. It aims to more than double this amount to Rs. 550 crore by the end of this financial year (2003-2004). Continued growth in the BPO and the software industry, has fueled the demand for IPLC circuits and Internet bandwidth during the last three months. Besides capitalising on the boom in this sector, part of TIEBU's incremental revenues also came from companies in the BFSI and Manufacturing industry, who have outsourced their various infrastructure requirements to Tata Indicom in terms of data center hosting, IP-based VPN services or managed services such as mail messaging or security.