Day 1/Session

The data specialist

Colonel HS Bedi, Chairman & MD, Tulip Telecom Ltd argued that CIOs want a single point of contact for all of their data needs

CIOs want multiple service providers, a single point of contact for all data needs to minimize conflicts and maximize ownership for NI, bandwidth, network management and datacenters, a single vendor for VPN, Internet and international bandwidth and multi-vendor bandwidth for datacenters. So stated Col. Bedi of Tulip, adding, “They want organizations that respond to their every need. If it is a telephone that goes down it’s OK. The moment a link goes down, your business comes to a standstill. You want specialists in your domain.”

As per Frost & Sullivan, VPN is the fastest growing market. ILD, NLD are also growing. The data services market is estimated to be around Rs. 5,155 crores and is estimated to reach Rs. 15,423 crores with a CAGR of 25.1%. The large enterprises market contributes to around 69% of the market.

The growth of data market is driven by MPLS/VPN which is expected to have a share of nearly 50% in 2012-2013.

“We have rolled out our own fiber in the commercial space. We are expanding into a 100 cities where, in the next 1-2 years, we will have our own fiber,” he said.

“We have a 38.5% share of the VPN segment. The rest is largely between Tata, Bharti and Reliance. The overall data market is worth about Rs 3,000 crores. We were only addressing an Rs 1,300 crores portion of the market as we did not have last mile on fiber and were restricted to wireless. Now that we have fiber in place, we will start addressing the entire market,” said Col. Bedi outlining Tulip’s strategy.

“Almost 70% of you would probably be our customers today. We have more than 1,500 large customers, our network is 1,400 cities. We have a market cap of about Rs 3,000 crores. Most of the telcos do not have last mile delivery in most cities. They will probably be in four-five cities. Data forms 0.5% to 2% of the business of the large telecom companies. Because we lease from everybody it gives us the largest reach. If anybody else’s fiber gets cut, their network goes down. Since we lease from multiple players, we have backups available,” he said.

“We are getting into managed services in a big way. As we understand your requirements, what we understand is that for your head offices and major branches of customers located in commercial / institutional clusters you require high bandwidth from 2 to 155 Mbps. Branches / outlets like bank branches need 64 to 512 Kbps in major cities and the smallest of towns. Dealers need low bandwidth of 16 to 256 Kbps. Our aim is that in the next 18 months 70% of our revenues will come from fiber.

Our customers today include most large financial institutions, most telecom companies and most large corporates,” said Col. Bedi.

Looking at the bandwidth scenario there were six companies that have set up robust fiber networks. “We lease bandwidth from all of them. While we lease bandwidth from all the telecom players, we also lease bandwidth from all the utilities. The entire network is managed from our NOCs in Delhi and Mumbai. We have a datacenter in Delhi and two in Mumbai and one in Bangalore,” he said.

“We want to be a major player in the rural market. With 70% of the population living in rural areas and the government focusing on it through schemes and financial inclusion, we want to play a big role here,” said Col. Bedi.

“We offer an uptime of over 99.9%. This is last mile on wireless to the remotest city across the country. We have MPLS in over 150 cities,” he concluded.

— Prashant L Rao