Interview with Mr. Prateek Pashine, Head – Enterprise Business, Tata Teleservices

• India’s ICT industry has seen a number of significant changes in the past couple of years. Please elaborate on some trends that will change the ICT landscape in the coming years.

India’s ICT marketplace is seeing some significant shifts in the last few years. Based on feedback that we get from the marketplace, I believe that there are 4 key technology trends that will influence the customer’s ICT investments in the coming years.

Enterprise mobility

As users embrace a plethora of new devices, we are seeing a convergence of IT and Mobile Applications because these users want to access business applications on their mobile devices – smartphones and Tablets. While BYOD brings with it a set of challenges, CIOs also believe that “mobilizing” their applications will improve productivity of the employees (especially the mobile workforce), bring in process efficiencies due to process automation and most importantly improve the overall responsiveness of the employees to end customers and partners alike.

Social Media and Collaboration

Businesses across India are beginning to see the value of social media to not only engage with customers and seek feedback on their services but also as a platform to collaborate for developing new ideas and services. Social media is also being used effectively to engage with employees especially if they are spread over multiple locations.

Adoption of Cloud

Since technology is changing by the day, CTOs are seeing the value of adopting technologies hosted on the Cloud.  Businesses can not only reduce the risk of investment but ensure a quicker go-to-market in terms of the technology being adopted, besides avoiding the risk of technological obsolescence in on-premise deployment.

The Internet of Things and Big Data

“Big data” and “IOT” have emerged as technology buzzwords in recent years, but adoption of such solutions has been limited across the Country. IOT and M2M deployments have been confined primarily to the Utilities and Transport & logistics space. However, we believe that 2015 will see significant investments in IOT and Big Data Projects.  The Government’s “Digital India” and Smart Cities initiatives will further drive the adoption of IOT technologies across industries.

Tata Teleservices is at the forefront of providing world-class ICT services to enterprise customers across the country. We were the first telecom service provider to set up a Cloud/IOT practice in the country, to not only provide Cloud and IOT services to customers but to also help them develop their strategy to adopt these technologies as well.

What is the role of the Internet of Things (IoT) for enterprises and what is the state of deployment of IoT in India?

As mentioned earlier, both service providers and businesses are exploring the possibilities connected devices and IoT can bring to the services they render and the way they conduct their businesses. Today, enterprises are realizing that the adoption of IoT in their operations will not only lead to increased productivity and process efficiencies, but also a reduction of costs.

We have seen IOT and M2M deployments primarily in the Utilities and transportation space but that is changing slowly. As the device, sensor and application ecosystem grows, we are seeing investments being made across the BFSI, Retail, Healthcare and even the home and building management space.

As far as the IOT market opportunity in India is concerned, while findings of Market Research companies may vary, they are unanimous in their conclusion that this is a trillion dollar opportunity in terms of revenue potential. Research indicates that by 2020, India will have over 5 billion connected devices which essentially means that we are going to witness exponential growth of these services in the next few years.

• What are the enterprise solutions offered by Tata Teleservices?

Tata Teleservices offers the most comprehensive suite of solutions in the Enterprise space and I can confidently say that we are in a position to cater to every communication need of the customer and their ecosystem.

While the initial focus was on providing the traditional voice and data services, we have moved up the customer value chain and our current product portfolio also includes complex services such as Security and threat management, Fleet Management, Mobile Applications, Cloud, SaaS, CDN services among others.

For customers, technology solution will generally involve multiple components which could consist of devices, connectivity and applications. At Tata Teleservices, we take end-to-end ownership of the entire solution which could include the application as well as the device layer as well. Simply put, we are the one-stop-shop for the customer.

The following is a list of the products and solutions which we offer to our enterprise customers ;

• How is your business ensuring the adoption of Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud (SMAC)?

We are seeing a clear need emerging amongst our customers for solutions related to social, enterprise mobility, big data and the cloud.

Mobility and social media are beginning to play a significant role in defining the way an enterprise engages not only with their customers but employees as well. The increase in internet penetration and usage coupled with seamless web access via mobile and increasing availability of affordable smart devices has led to a number of business owners turn to mobile applications and social media for running their businesses and creating customized services for their customers.

Studies have shown that around 96 per cent of small businesses use wireless devices and technology within their operations. Two-thirds of small businesses today state that they would not survive without wireless technology while 72 per cent of small businesses use mobile applications in their business and 92 per cent marketers indicate that social media is important for their businesses.

At Tata Teleservices we believe that the next technology disruption will involve Social, Mobility, Analytics, Cloud and IoT. In the last 6 months, we conducted 9 large customer events across the country and the theme of these events centered around Social, Mobility, Cloud and IOT. We invited industry experts to share their thoughts on how our customers could harness the power of these technologies within their respective organizations.

• What are some of the key challenges when it comes to the changing technological trends in the enterprise segment?

While technology brings with it many advantages, it brings its share of challenges as well.  In my view, the top four challenges will relate to the following;

• Security – how do enterprises ensure information security as more of their applications gets accessed over the Internet
• Technology obsolescence – do CIOs make investments knowing that technology advancements may make their current investments redundant
• Scalability – will vendors be able to manage large scale deployments
• Storage of data – how will enterprises ensure secure storage of the humongous amount of data that will get generated in the future as they deploy IOT solutions

At Tata Teleservices, we are working with customers to help address these challenges. As an example, we offer device vendor agnostic and cloud based IOT and enterprise mobility solutions which help customers address concerns related to technology obsolescence and storage of data. We are working on deploying an IOT platform in the near future which will enable us to address challenges associated with scalability and security as well.