‘India Is The Best Place To Revolutionise Technology’
Coriant’s Chief Customer Officer and EVP of Global Sales and Digital Marketing, Homayoun Razavi, is thrilled at the technological trends he sees in India. India, he opines, is truly a country where technology can be revolutionised. In a free-wheeling chat with BW Businessworld, Razavi and Coriant’s Managing Director (India and Asia Pacific South) Vikram Shanbhag, talk of the requirements of today’s customers, Coriant’s reach across 42 countries, the company’s innovative MSP programme and Hyperscale Carrier Architecture.
Razavi, you have 35 years of experience in catering to service providers. What were your achievements at Coriant?
Homayoun Razavi: I was brought into the company in April 2017 to restructure the organisation and work on our positioning, focus, and vision. One of my main areas of focus was on the Coriant portfolio, which spans networking layers 0 to 3, or from optical to IP. I looked at the dynamics of understanding our service provider customers and large enterprises along with what I could do to help them meet their business and margin goals. A total of $900 million was invested to bring our end-to-end product portfolio to a best-in-class level in the market.
The first step towards achieving those goals started off with a 20-year relationship I had with Gary Testa, who is the CEO of a company named Engineered Fluids. They have a liquid that cools down electronics, such as servers that would be used in central offices and datacenters, which typically consumed tremendous amounts of power. This liquid is not water – but it is not harmful to people or the environment; as you can also taste it. This has helped us build a far more efficient and compact solution, which will dramatically lower the cost for service providers building 5G networks as well as Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC) to serve the needs of IoT, AR/VR/MR, and other critical applications.
What does the ‘Sound of Disruption’ mean for Coriant in the Indian and SE Asian markets?
Vikram Shanbhag: From a telecom equipment perspective we have lighted over 65,000 kilometres of fibre in India. In telecom terms we have covered some 20,000 nodes that are live in India and about 2,00,000 access points which are connecting banks, enterprises and government agencies on the strengths of our network.
From a disruption perspective in our existing market, we are aiming at helping customers who are seeking to lower expenditures despite high capacity growth and low revenue. Apropos to our contributions in the telecom world, Coriant is saving on the Total Cost of the Ownership (TCO) equation and optimising that from a power, space and cooling perspective. Coriant is also focused on bringing the application close to the edge, which enables ease of operations contiguous to the location of the consumers.
As the new Coriant with our tagline ‘Sound of Disruption,’ we are powering technologies of the future along with applications that keep them running at a low cost for network operators and enterprises.
With capacity on one hand and cost on the other, what differentiates Coriant from its competitors in India?
Homayoun Razavi: If Coriant had to come to India to just sell another box like my competitors, it would become a very difficult market to survive in. We are coming to India and bringing a solution which will help save money because of the Coriant MSP ecosystem that I explained earlier. Bringing in a new technology doesn’t necessarily mean you would be more cost-efficient, but if one innovation can save expenses on infrastructure and power for a service provider, consumers would be encouraged to invest in that platform. In this market you just don’t have to bring a “technology,” but rather a “solution” that would be applicable for today and for future trends that come along. As such, we want to further explore the benefits that can be brought along with the Coriant Hyperscale Carrier Architecture in India.
With over 500 major clients across the world, how has Coriant developed its approaches in generating customer value?
Vikram Shanbhag: In India, we are obviously looking at hyper growth and from an environmental perspective in our case, the disruption that is coming along with fibre optics business Internet service providers, followed by the cost for providing the capacities to sustain our business. These are some of the ways in which we are generating customer value in India and South East Asia.
Homayoun Razavi: The key is to provide a solution for customers which is low on OpEx and extends the life of CapEx. Our solutions clearly decrease the OpEx by reducing space and power while enabling easier and more efficient deployment of service-enabling servers in the same vicinity. It is the icing on the cake if I can help my customers monetise through our services, and that is mainly through IoT, video compression, and AR/VR/MR, which are the next series of consumer and business world requirements.
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