Indian Telephones Industries Limited has diversified into e-governance and datacentres with the hope of alternate sources of revenues to survive the recession.
The telecom company in association with Trimax has set up its first phase of the datacentre in its campus in Bangalore. The existing premises is of 75,000 sqft and by 2010 the company is planning to complete the datacentre that would be built over an area of 1,20,000 sqft
Siddhartha Behura, chairman, Telecom Commission and secretary, Telecom, Government of India said, ‘To survive ITI is looking at alternate sources of revenues and this recession has forced even companies like Motorola to look for different areas.’
So besides the regular telecom products business, ITI has also entered into the new businesses and hope to make it profitable in the years to come, said Behura.
On the e-governance front, ITI is working on State Wide Area Network (SWAN) services with two states namely Maharashtra and Orissa.
Besides with the Ministry of Human Resource coming out with the Unique ID project, three PSU has been shortlisted for implementing this project in India. We are going to go ahead with this project in the coastal areas of the south India. We shall take this project forward through our Palaghat unit, said S K Chatterjee, CMD of ITI Limited.
It has become essential for ITI to revive its strategy in this tough global market. As only 4-5 players into the data centre business, ITI will be the first in the government sector to start a data base of its own.
As per the understanding, Trimax will control 82% of the stake while ITI will get 18%. The phase 1 of the datacentre has been completed at a cost of INR 77 crore and already a number of government companies like RailTel, Karnataka Police Housing Ltd, Business Intelligent Technologies, Glodyne, Madhucon are all in the final discussion to host on the ITI datacentre.
We expect an revenue of INR 50 crore in the first year of operations and expect to generate much higher revenue in the future. ITI has also plans to expand its datacentre facilities to Palaghat and Lucknow, said Chatterjee.