Tata Indicom Enterprise Business Unit (TIEBU), the umbrella organisation that sells the services of various Tata group companies in the telecom space, expects to close the current year with revenues of over Rs 500 crore, said Mr Sandeep Mathur, president, TIEBU. "We have already done business to the tune of Rs 475 crore on an annualised basis," he said.

With the Singapore-Chennai cable expected to be ready by the fourth quarter of 2004, the group expects to see an enhanced international bandwidth availability. Chennai will then become a group company, VSNL’s third landing point for international connectivity. Apart from the $100 million investment in this cable, it is also working on enhancing domestic connectivity linking Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai on the same lines as the Mumbai-Delhi connectivity link.

This is part of TIEBU’s three-tier approach to take on the market head on. TIEBU, which was set up in April last year, plans to enhance the infrastructure available, launch new products of relevance to different industry verticals and offer customised solutions. The group companies that make up TIEBU (VSNL, Tata Teleservices, Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) and Tata Internet Services) offer entire range of services from infrastructure, international long distance (ILD) and national long distance (NLD), wireless and wireline telephony, Internet, VPN, hosting and colocating, and other value added services such as managed services.

The company is planning to target various verticals though its largest share of revenues (60 per cent) came from the IT and ITES market in the current fiscal. Of this, Bangalore accounted for over 40 per cent, given the huge IT services and the BPO market.

TIEBU has specific products for the ITES segment where companies can "pay per use" bandwidth time. Most of the smaller ITES units today are investing far more in 24 hour bandwith, but are using only 10-12 hours, said Mr Mathur. TIEBU is giving them an option to cut down fixed costs and go in for a scheme where costs vary depending on the volume of business. For the IT services industry, TIEBU is offering shared lines for domestic connectivity instead of leased lines between its multiple locations in the country.