Tata Communications : Evolving and Thriving Amidst Industry Turmoil

by Shawn Price, President

 

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives… but the one most responsive to change”
Charles Darwin

 

There are several established industries experiencing earth shattering shifts, but few are as abrupt as the changes happening in the Telco world. Ten years ago, life was good for Carriers. If you were a carrier, you completely owned the customer, the devices. You had complete control over what apps and services went on those devices. You packaged up voice plans and charged for minutes used. And customers couldn’t leave you! There was no such thing as number portability and regulations locked people into long term contracts.

 

Fast forward to present, and a very different situation is playing out. Today, carriers are under siege. These days, people want iPhones, or an Android phones, or a Motorola Xoom, and they could care less which carrier sells them. People are talking less, texting less, and the bread and butter revenues for Carriers are starting to shrink in meaningful ways.

 

In the face of all this change, most carriers are flailing, unable to adapt. And worse yet, even if they wanted to make changes and offer new services, their billing structure is so brittle and expensive, it can take years and literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it happen.

 

But Tata Communications is not “most carriers.” Tata, the number one international voice carrier, (in fact the second largest carrier in India) saw the writing on the wall, and three years ago began the journey of offering a completely new set of services to customers called InstaCompute. InstaCompute provides businesses with a fully automated, self-provisioned pay-per-use computing and storage solution that provides enterprise-scale cloud computing to businesses worldwide. This allows Tata to offering a hybrid solution of cloud, networking and hosting services that no other provider in the market can match.

 

But what to do about the god awful legacy billing problems? Today, we announced that Zuora is providing the subscription commerce platform for Tata’s InstaCompute cloud offering initially across the Indian and Asian markets, and soon to follow in Europe and North America.

 

Just to put that into context: What it would normally take years, Zuora did in 2 months.

 

Now that’s something Darwin himself would have applauded.

 

For more information about the Tata Communications success story, see our customer showcase and videos.

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