The company has set up three new PoPs in Budapest and two other, still unnamed, cities, in addition to existing PoPs in Moscow and Warsaw, in order to sell corporate wide area network (WAN), unified communications and security services to operators.
“We want to offer a deeper range of services to the partners we have today,” said Conor Carroll, SVP of Tata Communications’ service provider business, naming Bulgaria’s BTC, Poland’s Polkomtel and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile as partners for the new range of services.
“We want to offer a joint proposition into the local markets,” he added. The three new PoPs “are in deployment now. There will be other PoPs in 2017 but that’s not something I can disclose now.”
Enterprises will be the main target for the new services, including Skype for Business, audio conferencing, and others using Tata Communications’ relationships with Cisco and Microsoft. “We see the enterprise market growing in terms of new services.” He notes a particular demand for protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
“Our partners want to resell DDoS to their own client base. It’s very much a localised play, providing services that operators are not offering in their own markets.” Tata Communications does not plan to target enterprises directly, but will work through local partners.
The expansion is the latest move for Tata Communications, which has also set up PoPs in Brazil, connected to Seaborn Networks’ Seabras-1 cable, in addition to the eastern European expansion.
“The partner ecosystem is the growth story of Tata Communications,” said Carroll. “It’s how we see ourselves evolving.” The Moscow PoP already has partners, he said.
