Following the footsteps of the Tata Teleservices, BSNL has
decided to take the cloud route and offer other managed data
services along with it. “Last decade belonged to the growth
of the telecom and the decade ahead would witness exponential
growth of data and related services.” With these words, Gopal
Das, CMD, BSNL announced the incumbent telecom operator’s
foray into the data center services market.
With an initial investment of Rs 200 crore, BSNL would start
offering various services like managed co-location services,
dedicated hosting services, disaster recovery services and cloud
services (on demand compute, storage and network capacity) within
the next six months in association with Datacraft wherein BSNL
would provide the data center infrastructure and Datacraft would
offer data services and support. The initial agreement is for a
seven year period, which is extendable for another three years.
In the first phase, BSNL will build these six data centers at
Jaipur, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Ghaziabad and Faridabad with a
total space of 66,000 square feet and target government and
enterprise customers (especially the BFSI sector) for cloud and
related services. In the second phase, the company plans to target
the SMB market with cloud and SaaS offerings that are suited to
meet their requirements. Accordingly, BSNL will setup four
additional data centers at Hyderabad, Bangalore, Tiruchi and Ranchi
and would tie up with another service provider than Datacraft. This
expansion would give the company an overall data center footprint
for 1,10,000 square feet.
“SMBs find it hard to manage their IT infrastructure and
retain their IT staff. With cloud services, SMBs can leverage our
expertise in managing their IT infrastructure with a hosted data
center or a complete cloud solution,” Rajesh Wadhwa, COO,
BSNL said.
BSNL has equipped itself with a workforce of 8,000 people to
support the new business. The company has identified three segments
of target customers, categorized as Platinum, Gold and Silver.
Platinum and Gold customers would be high value customers which
BSNL and Datacraft would serve directly. For the Silver category,
the services would be provided through partners.
“Competition is eating into the profit of telecom
operators as the tariffs have come down drastically, leading to an
extremely low ARPU. Thus, it is imperative for all operators to
look at other value added services for additional revenues. We
expect these data services to be the most profitable part of our
overall business. Currently our revenues from the enterprise
segment stands at Rs 1,350 crore and we expect this to grow to Rs
2,000 crore within a year’s time,” Das opined.
The company feels their customer base of 6.8 million broadband
subscribers will help them grow their data services business --
both within and outside the country.