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Journalism of Courage
During a golf outing at the Capital’s exclusive Army Club, Abu Shafquat, managing director of Telstra V-Comm, the premier corporate networking and end to end solutions company, pricked up his ears to listen a conversation between two senior executives from Essar Cellphones and Hero Motors about his newly formed company.
“I listened carefully what they had to talk about my company,” says Shafquat in recounting the experience, adding: “It’s important to pick up small bits and pieces of information about your business and add them to your line of growth…. because, in a depressed market, that is the only way you grow.”
Rightly so. In less than a year of commercial operations, Telstra V-Comm has picked up crores of business in the burgeoning VSATs (very small aperture terminals) communication network market and today has a plethora of clients that range from the state-owned Central for Scientific and Industrial Research and multinationals like Pepsi, Mahindra Ford, Technova Du Pont and Indian giants like Sahara India and Nicholas Piramal.
Barely two months ago, Telstra V-Comm, the joint venture between Telstra Corporation of Australia, VSNL and IL&FS, had signed one of major contracts of the season with India’s premier research agency, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, to build operate and manage a state of the art voice, data and video network. Interestingly, Telstra V-comm is the first VSAT operator to provide the leading edge technology of high speed DAMA network services in the Indian subcontinent.
“It is an encouraging fact that not only have the Indian companies started to recognise the relevance of DAMA technology for VSAT communications networks but a whole range of Indian government departments have also started procuring our services,” says Shafquat.
The network CSIR will provide high speed communications between 15 remote locations of CSIR fore-mail, remote computing, database access, multimedia web page access, toll quality voice and facscimile transmission, video broadcast and conferencing. Telstra V-Comm will use equipment from US-based Huges Network System Inc., for this network and enhance the service offering with their own project management skills developed by an advanced expertise on similar technology.
The network will use VSATs in a fully meshed configuration with a central hub that will be operated and managed by Telstra V-Comm. CSIR have already pioneered fundamental research in the country by attracting some of the country’s best scientists and complemented this in recent times by intellectual investment from major multinational corporations. With the establishment of this network, CSIR will have charted for itself a winning strategy to be at the forefront of the development fraternity by using information technology to create the virtual laboratory.
Scientists at one location could ideally interact and work with their colleagues at another laboratory physically separated yet connected in space. Given the fact that CSIR has 40 laboratories in some of the remote areas, the important – and the utility – of this network will be crucial in providing CSIR the winning edge in an increasingly shrinking globe.
And jot just Telstra V-Comm, Rs 1200 crore VSAT communication network market in India is expanding manifold with other major players like Essel Shyam, Hughes Network and Comsat Max – all reaping benefits that has helped the market register a growth that stretched beyond 60 per cent during 1997-78.
Consider this. Hughes Escorts Communication Limited (HECL), the joint venture between Hughes Network and Escorts, which is currently the market leader with a turnover is likely to stretch beyond Rs 100 crore has a list of clients that reads like a veritable who’s who of the Indian corporate sector — Hindustan Lever, Proctor and Gamble, Bombay Stock Exchange, Reserve Bank of India and Bank of America. Again, HCL-Comnet sprang a surprise when it pocketed the coveted business of National Stock Exchange (NSE) earlier this year.
“I cannot give you the name but negotiations are on currently with a few more corporate majors and we hope to increase our business manifold the growth potential is tremendous, especially when all VSAT operators are now readily offering internet services…well, just look at the benefits being reaped by the stock exchanges and the RBI,” remarks a senior official of Hughes Network.
The growth is understandable. In a nation where telecom services are still not fool proof and suffer from faulty transmissions, rank bureaucratic pressures and red tapeism, there is already a growing demand from both state-owned companies and the corporate sector – especially a large number of multinationals and Indian majors like the Reliance, Goenkas, Tatas and the Birlas, ostensibly because today’s VSAT suppliers are also offering internet services as an additional package to their clients.
“Please understand that in India, a large number of major companies have their plants in areas which are not developed. For example a steel plant in Gopalpur or a cement plant in distant Rajasthan. And if you explain the importance of VSAT and ISP (Internet Service Provider) benefits to the client, who has traditionally relied on land-lines, he will realise that VSAT is clean, neat economics for him,” argues Sandip Shirodkar, manager (business development), Silicon Graphics.
Agrees M. N. Vyas, executive director of Essel Shyam: “The Indian Telecom Report of 1997 predicts that the number of VSATs in the country during the next five years will be 45,000…but we totally disagree with that. Our prediction is that the number will hover anywhere 100,000.” Essel Shyam Communications Limited (ESCL), an ambitious joint venture recently set up to provide advanced satellite based VSAT services in the country, brings together Essel, which is leader in media and entertainment for the Zee TV and Esselworld game park in Mumbai and Shyam Telecom, a premier telecommunications equipment manufacturer and the pioneer of indigenised rural communications in India.
The new company, which has Siticable as one of its major clients and is currently closing deals with a host of multinationals, plans to mobilise its resources in the field of media and distance education learning, apart from the regular VSAT services of voice, data, fax and video transfer expects of revolutionise the VSAT application areas in the country.
“The VSAT market is relatively new but is growing at a fast rate as companies are increasingly realising the importance of faster communication network. In a complex market like India, VSAT market will improve once the dealer network concept has matured,” he said in a recent interview.
.Sums up Partha Dev, Manager (Structures) of Triune Projects, an engineering consultancy firm in the field of oil & gas sector for major Indian and overseas clients worldwide: “Projects these days rely heavily on round of the clock engineering spread out all over the globe, which is just not served by the narrow bandwidths available in physical communication links. For example, two buildings of Philips on either side of the road in Mumbai use VSAT for communication and not physical links. The need of the hour is VSAT because it bypasses the bottlenecks of physical linkages.”
