Tata Communications recently held an analyst event in NYC to discuss its plans to expand its presence in the US. While Tata has had a wholesale presence for quite some time and acquired a US company, this marks a new effort to serve the US market.
Unlike other attempts by global telcos to penetrate the US market, Tata Communications plans to be far more selective. It plans to leverage its global digital fabric to enable US companies with a large international presence to have higher availability, better reach, and significantly improved experiences on its global network.
This expansion is part of a strategy that was implemented in 2020 by CEO AR Laksshminaryanan that focused on driving growth, increasing revenues, and transforming the company culture to be customer focused. In just four years, Tata Communications has experienced significant growth, with its network now supporting almost one-third of all internet traffic (30%) and its growth is reflected in its stock price.
Also impressive was the claim that the Tata Communications NPS score is about 80 – in an industry where the average score is 31.[1]Tata hopes to leverage that as a differentiator when approaching US customers.
Its Digital Fabric Platform consists of the following solutions:
- Global network: This is a highly available network that leverages multiple undersea cables and is capable of providing excellent connectivity to India and China. Due to the breadth and depth of their network, Tata stated they can reduce a typical global network of up to 30 different network vendors to just 1 or 2 providers.
- Cloud and security offerings: Tata has created the Cloudlyte multi-access edge platform to accelerate the deployment of applications anywhere across the globe. To ensure security Tata has options for managed SASE solutions from multiple different vendors or a unified solution that is hosted.
- Interaction fabric: Organizations with distributed contact centers can utilize Tata to improve contact center performance and ensure enhanced customer and agent experiences. This includes a customer interaction suite created by Kaleyra and acquired by Tata Communication in June of 2023.
- IoT fabric: As more organizations collect data at the edge, Tata looks to provide the connectivity to connect IoT devices and bridge the gap between IT and OT.
To demonstrate that they could deliver for US companies the speakers highlighted numerous companies currently using Tata. One of the more impressive examples was Formula One, which used Tata to support the telecast traffic from every global event. They also cited an auto manufacturer and an airline.
To lead the US efforts, Tata reached out to IBM veteran Dino Trevisani (Previously Chairman of Canadian operations for IBM). Dino will be responsible for building a team and growing the business in the US. Again, this will be a focused effort to support global companies headquartered in the US.
There is still a fair amount of work to do to build up their team and get their story out to all these global companies in the US. However, Tata Communications’ ability to execute has been impressive over the last four years and the team we met is passionate about the opportunity. If they can land some key anchor accounts and earn NPS scores in the 80s, they should be able to establish a strong presence in the US.
[1] Telecom NPS Benchmarks and CX Trends in 2023 | NPS in Telecoms (customergauge.com)
