‘We plan to build 5 more Pops in India’
What was the purpose of your visit to India?
I am here to meet with our key customers to understand how can we serve them and their growth plans better. Also, we have our kick-off workshop with our India team as our new FY has just started. We also organized a customer event in Delhi to share our capabilities and service offerings.
What are SingTel’s plans for India?
We may come up with 5 more PoPs (Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Chandigarh, and 2 more cities) in the next 2 years depending on the demand growth. As of now, SingTel has 2 international gateways, one in Chennai and the other one in Mumbai. We have a resilient network with 7 dual PoPs in Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, and Kolkata connected in a mesh network.
What is the company’s focus for this fiscal?
The Indian businesses are expanding globally, so the demand for international connectivity is increasing. We have 22% stake in airtel. Anyone who is interested in international connectivity is on our radar.
Up till 2008, Indian businesses only had the US and Europe on their mind but post 2008, the growth is coming from regions like Middle East, APAC (Hong Kong, China, etc), Australia, and Africa. There has been a change in the business outlook.
For Indian region, the company has been focusing on verticals like IT/ITeS, BFSI, manufacturing, logistics, and pharmaceutical/healthcare. The company also has telco customers in India like Aircel, Vodafone, Tata, Sify, and Tulip.
Brief us about SingTel’s latest cloud applications.
We have received phenomenal response for our cloud services. Businesses are investing in them in a smaller way first and as they accrue benefits, we are hopeful that they shall take up more of these. We have signed up about 300,000 SMB customers for our SaaS services within one-and-a-half years. Infrastructure-as-aService (IaaS) has also shown a traction. The recently held Youth Olympics in Singapore is an IaaS success story.
SingTel has launched PowerON, a suite of end-to-end cloud based services available on demand sans any hefty costs and complexities, allowing businesses to focus their resources on building and sharpening their competitive edge. In fact, these services can reduce the operating cost up to 73%.
For on demand solutions, SingTel has tied up with many partners like Symantec for security on-demand (web, email, and end-point security services) and Arkadin for cloud conferencing solutions. Similar partnerships for various cloud services are in place with Cisco, Google, EMC, SAP, Intuit, and VMWare.