Vodafone India has shared its growth strategies aimed at assisting small and medium businesses (SMB) to grow their productivity. The telecom giant is rapidly growing its resources – for SMBs – from the present 1,500.

Vodafone Business Services has 80,000 SMB customers across 150 towns across the country.

The target is to grow to 200 towns this year and 400 towns in 2014.

Offering IT and communications services through a single window from telecoms are an emerging business in India. Besides Vodafone, telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Idea Cellular, Tata Teleservices, etc. are aggressively pushing their solutions into the SMB market.

According to Department of Science and Technology, the contribution of small and medium enterprises to India’s GDP is expected to increase to 22 percent by 2020, from the present 17 percent.

Strengthening focus on SMBs is expected to assist Vodafone to reduce pressure from voice business revenue.

“We are close to our customers. We have been dealing with SMBs for years. We understand their demands better than any software or IT company in India,” said Deepak Pande – executive vice president – SME Sales, Vodafone Business Services.

Vodafone has the reach. That’s why it can compete with a Microsoft or Google or Intel. In addition, it is a telecom service provider which has been selling communication solutions to Indian SMBs for years.

“Ultimately, we want to address the entire market. We will work with channel partners to expand our product offering. We will become a one stop shop in future. We could offer software and IT products besides communications,” Pande said.

Delhi is one of the key markets for VBS as the state houses a large base of SMBs. The growth in SMB segment is outpacing the large enterprise growth and this is likely to continue as SMBs expand in order to compete with larger businesses and also benefit from outsourcing some of the large enterprises work to smaller businesses.

Through a dedicated team of account managers and service managers, Vodafone Business Services offers a range of products and services such as machine to machine solutions, wireline data solutions (MPLS-VPN, Internet Leased Lines, domestic and international Leased Circuits), office wireline voice (E1-DID), toll free services, conferencing and collaboration, application mobility and mobile email & connectivity solutions to help SMBs.

Baburajan K
[email protected]