Considering the pressures of shrinking ARPUs from the consumer business, operators are looking at transforming themselves to go beyond offering vanilla connectivity. Najib Khan, CMO, Airtel Business, talked about the company’s approach to B2B. By Heena Jhingan
We were already doing fixed line and mobile services for the enterprises. The challenge was to go from offering pure mobile services to applications or from pure fixed line service to hosted contact center or VoIP solutions. Today, we offer mobile applications for sales force management, location-based or asset tracking services, etc. In the same vein, our offerings are evolving from traditional video conferencing to support PC or mobile video conferencing. The interesting part is that of moving enterprises from basic data center co-location on to the Cloud.
Is there a solid opportunity in the MSP space for a telco?
We will compete with small MSPs or large SIs. As we have already integrated our billing and support systems at the backend, Cloud and managed services come naturally to us. In the case of an SME, provisioning, selection of products and payments can be done online. The distribution setup that already exists on the B2C side can be leveraged to reach out to SMBs or even large enterprises for that matter.
How has the journey so far been?
Over time, growth has tapered off but we continue to outpace the overall market in the enterprise space. In the SMB space, we are growing at nearly 20-25%. In the case of the large enterprise, the opportunity is in managed video conferencing, mobile enablement of the workforce and the Cloud. The SMB space is still looking at connectivity and other basic stuff. SMBs lack IT heads and they want that function to be handled by the service provider. Airtel business contributes about 9-10% of our overall earnings We have evolved from a core carrier, to an MSP to an integrated ICT provider.
Service providers are becoming key contenders in the Cloud space. What is your Cloud strategy?
We look after our IT needs ourselves on day to day basis; we have virtualized our machines across the countries that we operate in. Therefore, we know from an application standpoint, the kind of dimensioning that’s required and the same is used for taking the products to market. Outsourcing IT does not mean outsourcing your brains; it is sensible to productize that knowledge and sell it in the B2B space. Our Application Technology Group does that for us.
An SMB is not looking at a branded offering; he is looking at the optimal outcome. He trusts Airtel and the other brands that are involved in delivering a service do not matter.
In the Cloud, we will focus on email, CRM, ERP, compute and storage as well as security.
Every enterprise is asking for mobility today thanks to BYOD. How do you place to cater to the requirement of the market, especially with context to your Mobile Application Tool for Enterprise (MATE) offering?
I can cite use cases such as the M-challan in Bangalore, Tax Collection in Chennai, Vehicle Tracking Project in Odisha, or deployments with the Punjab Irrigation Department. The market has moved from vanilla SIMs to application-oriented deployments. We have created an ecosystem of about 25 ISVs offering services that are hosted in our data center, productized and sold in the market.
The BYOD story starts with the fact that when you can empower your employees, you boost their productivity. BYOD has a HR and productivity angle. There are two parts to the applications business— the first is to take the application to the enterprise and the second is to take the same applications to the employees wherever they may be. Applications are now ready to be ported onto smartphones; this is our next goal. We have already developed ties with software vendors and we will now be focusing on developing a device ecosystem and developing the security layer.
How difficult is the government business to crack?
The potential of government vertical is humongous when you look at the various schemes but they are long drawn plans and take even longer to materialize. Look at our record—the Department of Income Tax, Indian Railways and the Airports Authority of India are completely on our network. Mobile enablement is the next big thing coming up in the government space. We have done several PoCs like the one on Public Distribution. The government is an important part of our business strategy; we have won several APDRP projects that include smart metering and MPLS. We select the battleground and go after them. Our next plan of action is to see if we can tackle mobile payments as a lot of collection is happening at utilities and these transactions could all be done using the Airtel Money platform. For the government sector, we don’t look at captive data center requirements but we do manage data centers. Transformational stuff will happen with mobile enablement, be it in rural health or in education.