Tata targets high-end network services
SINGAPORE--Tata Communications is going after the higher-end segment of the managed services market with a slew of varied investments in the Asia-Pacific region, company executives said Wednesday.
Richard Knott, Tata Communications' vice president of enterprise sales and managed services, said at a press event here that it is targeting customers in the "Fortune 2000 segment", by providing premium features to compete with services currently offered by other players such as operators and content-delivery network providers.
The Indian company intends to build upon its existing assets such as data centers in the region and subsea cable networks, to do so. For example, Tata offers a separately-charged DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) service to its Internet connectivity customers, which Knott said helps differentiate its offerings.
Simon Cooper, Tata Communications' vice president of network strategy, architecture and optimization, said the company is eyeing Asia's S$4 billion hosting market and will open a new data center in Singapore next year, making it Tata's fifth in the region.
The US$430 million data center is hoped to address the country's escalating demand for data center resources, said Cooper.
On Amazon's recent announcement to set up a cloud data center in Singapore, Cooper said: "We don't see Amazon as a competitor but an indicator of the momentum [around] cloud hardware."
He said Tata's connectivity assets, which Amazon does not have here, places the company on stronger stead to deliver managed data center services.
Tata also wants a piece of the content-delivery pie.
Lam Hon Kit, senior director of Internet Protocol (IP) product management of Tata Communications' global IP and VPN services division, said the company is pushing its accelerated content-delivery services to content owners such as broadcasters and games publishers.
It has tied up with several TV stations to stream video content over the Internet, as well as push large game file downloads to users, Lam said.
But, he stressed that Tata is not in "direct competition" with Akamai, which provides a content-delivery service as well.
Singing the same tune as the other executives, Lam said Tata is targeting relationships with content providers to host large files, whereas Akamai is less picky about the type and size of files it mirrors.
He added that Tata's content-delivery network rides on the company's global IP backbone to push files to users.