Tata Communications has announced an extension of its InstaCompute cloud service to Singapore and its surrounding countries, in bid to move further from its historical wholesale carrier services role.
The firm is seeking a larger slice of the crowded managed services market and positioning itself in competition with various telecoms operators, by reaching out directly to businesses.
Instacompute, which is being marketed as an infrastructure-as-a-service offering, was first launched in India last year in October. The expansion of the service to Singapore aims to cater to businesses in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Tata Communications’ cloud services for the region will be hosted out of the company’s data center in Singapore, and delivered over the firm’s IP backbone and MPLS networks. The data center runs Dell storage and compute infrastructure.
The firm aims to extend InstaCompute to Europe, the United States and South Africa by the end of the year.
Vinod Kumar, managing director and CEO of Tata Communications, said the company was hoping to entice customers with what he terms a ‘hybrid’ offering – a combination of cloud, hosting and co-location services.
Tata Communications was previously known as VSNL, which the Tata group acquired from the Indian government in 2008. The company’s revenue came solely from its wholesale business five years ago, but the firm has since branched out into other aspects such as managed services and VPN services. Kumar said wholesale carrier services now constitute between 65 – 70% of revenue.
The company operates a Tier-1 IP network with more than 400 PoPs across 200 countries; and close to 1 million square feet of data center and co-location space worldwide.
IDC estimates that over the next five years, Asia Pacific spending on IT cloud services will grow fourfold, reaching $4.6 billion by 2014. Spend on cloud computing will accelerate through the forecast period, with an expected CAGR of more than 40% across the region from 2010 – 2014.
An Ovum report from December last year hinted at significant opportunity for wholesale telecoms carriers to grow through the managed services route.
“The managed services provided by wholesale carriers are built from those that they provide for their own needs, for example security and data centers,” said Paris Burstyn, a senior analyst at Ovum.
“Leveraging them to deliver integrated wholesale managed services to intermediaries represents a natural evolutionary step in developing new business.”