Enterprise Business-A Key Building Block in Digital Telecom

Albeit, targeting the consumer remains the key always, but the initial business development takes place with enterprise business. Take the case of Internet, the foundation of Internet was in the B2B space and latter it moved to consumers.

The message conveyed is without primarily focusing on B2B space, it’s difficult to take any business to the consumer space. In the telecommunications space also, with the advent of 5G and IoT, B2B business has a key role to play as it is likely to hit $ 26 billion by 2026.

At the recently held Telecom Leadership Forum, the significance of enterprise business with respect to telecom was focused upon and how for building Digital India, enterprise business can play an effective role. How telcos and other communication service providers can help organizations to integrate customers, partners, and employees to increase revenue, decrease operating costs for the big and growing enterprise market? How sectors like BFSI, IT/ITeS, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Educations, Govt etc., are turning more agile and customer centric with solutions such as collaboration, cloud, managed solutions et al.

Anil Jain, CGM, BSNL, mentioned about the various initiatives taken by BSNL as part of enterprise business. He said that BSNL is playing an instrumental role in laying optic fiber for defense forces. Besides, having a key role in BharatNet, BSNL has put up 5,000 wi-fi hotspots in villages.

“BSNL has set up its enterprise business and enterprise as a business segment contributes around 10-20% to the overall business. BSNL is dealing in managed services, backhaul connectivity for enterprise customers,” Jain said.

Besides, BSNL is also approaching state governments and lending a helping hand towards building smart cities.

Meanwhile, Kapil Ahuja, CEO (North India), Reliance Jio, spoke about availability, accessibility and affordability for reaching out to the next level and how sectors such as Education, Healthcare would be the key verticals for building a Digital economy.

“We have tied up with thousand of colleges for imparting e-learning, artificial intelligence etc. In the healthcare segment too, we are reaching promoting telemedicine through video solutions,” he said.

Jai Menon, Group CTO, HTMedia, said that the telecom sector has evolved from a pipe provider to a platform services provider and therefore, telecom should graduate in the network side and in the enterprises side too.

With 5G and IoT, there would be a lot of power requirement for sensors and so, the need of the hour is the telecom operator should graduate to an event management infrastructure, with lots of focus around AI, cloud services, among others.

Stressing on some of challenges, Deval Parikh, Chief Executive Officer, Bright Star India, mentioned about the cost front. “The biggest challenge we face in a B2B is to ensure that everyone gets an optimum cost. In the last few years, we would have saved nearly $3 billion in capital investment. So, the challenge is that you keep on cutting on cost while ensuring minimum disruptions to business.”