Cable &Wireless: The India Foray Date:   Wednesday , January 02, 2008 Let us for a moment imagine that you are heading the operations of a bank that represents the face of shining India. It’s peak business time and given the hyperactive Sensex, you are experiencing heavy transactions. Suddenly, the bank’s servers fail, and before you decipher, the personnel managing your network inform you that the breakdown is technical and major and that it would take four hours to fix it. Given the colossal loss in business that you are staring at, you despise this curt observation.You lash out at the network service provider and even think on the lines of replacing it at the first go. However if Sunanda Das’ words are to be believed, it works to the contrary. Das, Managing Director of Cable & Wireless India says that such honest observation in the face of technical breakdowns has helped the company he heads garner trust which could never have come about had they not spelt out ‘four hours’ in such situations. “Customers do get very agitated at that instant, but later, they appreciate our openness for it helps them work out a plan and remain critical in case something similar were to happen in future,” he says. Right time with right focus Cable & Wireless has used the trust factor, and thereby the ‘quality of service’ peg to win over some big customers in India in the past year. The network services provider, credited with being the first company to lay a trans-Atlantic submarine cable system, has been present in India for the past 12 years. However its presence was limited to a support center that it ran for its managed network and security services supporting global customers, and its limited services to Indian customers. The new management of the company began looking at India as a key market around two years ago. Then onwards, the nearly 150 year old Cable & Wireless has focused on building a name in the Indian market. However given the fact that the BPO boom had already happened and companies had invested in their telecom infrastructure, wasn’t the company a couple of years too late to think of addressing the Indian market? After all, had it done the same a little earlier, it might have been able to win a lot more customers. “We’re here at the right time and with the right focus,” vouches Das. Cable & Wireless has strong presence particularly in Europe and Asia-Pac. And with Indian BPOs now looking to set up shop in Romania, Bulgaria, Mexico, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Manila and the likes to counter the escalating costs and move closer to their end customers, the former is well placed to provide the BPO firms with managed network services. With the Indian BPOs looking to migrate from TDM to IP based technology solutions, their partnership with Cable&Wireless provides them the right support to do so. Given the tight schedules and stringent SLAs to meet ever-demanding needs of their end customers, the BPO industry is extremely aggressive in their implementation requirements. To cater to the requirements of such an industry, Cable&Wireless comes into limelight with efficient delivery and a vibrant force. Also, now that the BPOs are looking to move out to other parts of the globe, they would want to focus on their core business opening up prospects for Cable&Wireless to manage their networks in India as well. Attacking the Indian market In India, the Cable & Wireless focuses on IT & ITES and BFSI companies. The core products it sells here are IPLC (International Private Leased Circuit), MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), Hosted Contact Center Solutions, Voice Solutions and Managed IT Services. Says Das, “We are constantly working towards adapting our U.K. product base according to the needs of the Indian market.” Primary among the company’s concerns is the quality of service it provides. In this regard, it tweaks its offerings to suit customer requirements, both technically and commercially. While the technical component involves working on certain product attributes adherent to the customer’s needs, it also charges the latter based on its business. Examples of flexible pricing include pay-by-use options and bandwidth on-demand options. Trust plays a very important role with regards to ‘quality of service’ in Cable & Wireless’ parlance. “We allow no fluff in front of the customer, whether it’s pre-sales or post sales,” notes Das. Cost and network coverage are the other important cogs in the quality of its service wheel. Incidentally, satisfactory quality of service is not what the company seeks to provide. Instead, it aims at industry-leading service. In this regard, it has consciously worked towards restricting the kind of deals it works on, while also being selective in choosing its customer base in India. Cable&Wireless India, is now focused on providing premium services to the leading Indian BPOs and International MNCs in the Indian market. However will Cable & Wireless be able to make a mark in India, especially given Gartner’s observation that “many providers still want their own assets in key new markets, such as India and China, which they see as key future growth engines for their businesses.” Das uses the same eulogy to ascribe attention to the fact that Cable & Wireless is not competing with the likes of Bharti, Reliance and Tata that have well-established domestic networks. In fact, it has a working partnership with VSNL, Bharti and Reliance for many years. “We focus on a single point of ownership for the customer,” says Das. For customers that have limited global requirements and a good relationship with Indian players, the company adopts an indirect approach whereby it lets its Indian partners become the single point of ownership for the customer. In other cases, they themselves engage with customers directly. The India team of Cable & Wireless takes on the mantle of providing network services to MNCs who come to India and who do not have a network of their own while also engaging global requirements of Indian companies. Its solutions are interoperable on clients’ infrastructure as well as their own. Given that it competes with network service providers like Verizon and AT&T and most Indian IT firms’ clients are U.S. based, wouldn’t IT firms choose the latter as service providers since their clients may be more comfortable with service providers from their own geography? “In a competitive world, its all about the quality of service,” opines Das. And that’s exactly what the company he manages is betting on. Working in cable & wireless Colleague Empowered! The ‘GR8 Place 2 Work’ initiative within Cable & Wireless focuses on bringing about enhanced ‘colleague engagement’. “It is essential to bring about changes that colleagues want,” says Kishan Kumar, Transformation Manager who has been entrusted with changing the outlook of Cable and Wireless India. The program seeks to bring ‘Great People’ to the forefront of community affairs in the company since ‘Great People Make a Great Business’. In its endeavor to ensure a work-life balance, Cable & Wireless has a compulsory off for its colleagues on their birthday and anniversary. There is also a Fun-Do team in place, which looks after the fun aspects at work and helps maintain a healthy work-life balance. Fun is their serious business. There is also a Lounge and a Games’ Room, full with a pool table, foosball table and dart board, which are open throughout the day for ‘colleagues’. The 300 odd workforce, out of a total 450, of the company has moved to a new state-of-the-art facility in ITPL, Bangalore. Gone also is the old company logo. The new logo, with its riot of six different colors and fascinating eye-catching icons seeks to promote certain cheerfulness. With a culture that preaches usage of ‘Colleagues’ rather than ‘Employees’ or ‘Sirs’ and values that echo Customer Focus, Doing the right thing, Keeping Promises and Succeeding Together, Cable&Wireless India looks to be the ‘Employer of Choice’ in the industry.