As it diversifies its digital portfolio, Tata Communications has been growing its products and services across verticals like media and entertainment. Amur Lakshminarayanan MD & CEO, tells Urvi Malvania that core digital services like network transformation and CPaaS services will continue to evolve as the business environment changes and enterprises adopt cloud. Excerpts:
How are you looking at investments into CPaaS (communication platform as a service), given the changing ecosystem?
It’s a well-known fact that the SMS business growth is coming down. People are reporting single-digit growths from very high 20% plus in the past. That is why we said that strategically, we are going to invest into expanding from SMS to other channels, whether programmable voice or other channels of RCS or emails or WhatsApp. The other investments that we are doing is creating software layers because just expanding the number of channels is not good enough. The software layers will bring more intelligence on top of it.
What is the status of Kaleyra’s integration?
Kaleyra is contributing to revenues, but all of the acquisitions (Kaleyra, Oasis and The Switch) need to go through a transformation. We are in the process of transforming Kaleyra – combining what we had and what it brought across different elements. For example, in engineering, we had some gateways around the world like them and we are now combining them. That’s an 18-month project. On the product side similarly, there was some duplication and we need to bring (all capabilities) on a single platform, which will take 12 months. And finally, there are people coming together so that is also getting streamlined as we speak.
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Having said that, when we announced the deal, I said that the sales teams combined will sell only one product. So on the sales side, from day one we were very clear on the synergies we would drive.
You also acquired controlling stake in Oasis for the e-sim business. What is the update on that?
The e-sim business is seeing slower growth. Globally, changes are happening and new standards are coming. So far in the consumer world, they call it the SGP 02. Next is going to be the standard of SGP 32 that will fundamentally change many things. We are positioning ourselves for a world in the future.
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