Rapheal John-Lall

C&W Busi­ness is of­fer­ing IT prod­ucts that can help busi­ness­es to main­tain a com­pet­i­tive edge said David D'Oliveira, vice pres­i­dent, busi­ness and gov­ern­ment sales, C&W Busi­ness.

"Busi­ness­es need change and need to evolve and you have to de­pend on IT to de­liv­er that. Whether it is up­grad­ing or down­grad­ing to meet your busi­ness needs, you need to be ag­ile. With our ser­vice, we de­liv­er IT as a ser­vice on de­mand, when you need it, where you need it, to what­ev­er de­mand. We of­fer the en­tire pack­age end-to-end and it is built on a world-class high­ly re­liant net­work," he told the Busi­ness Guardian two Wednes­days ago.

John Maduri, pres­i­dent, busi­ness so­lu­tions, C&W Busi­ness, who al­so took part in the in­ter­view at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, said they are launch­ing a new brand in T&T which is C&W Busi­ness and it rep­re­sents the com­ing to­geth­er of the old Ca­ble and Wire­less–a com­pa­ny that has been in busi­ness for 140 years–and Colum­bus.

"We are launch­ing this new brand in the mar­ket. The merg­er closed in March 2015 and we are rough­ly sev­en months in­to the merg­er and things have been go­ing well," he said.

He said a lot of the dy­namism now is in the small busi­ness sec­tor and C&W Busi­ness will be launch­ing a new prod­uct called Work­place So­lu­tion.

He added that when C&W Busi­ness of­fer their ser­vices, SMEs do not need to come up with large cap­i­tal in­vest­ments to get their busi­ness start­ed.

"You want to think of it as a com­bi­na­tion of chief in­for­ma­tion of­fi­cer (CIO) in a box or of­fice in a box. It brings to­geth­er all of the com­po­nents of what small busi­ness­es need be suc­cess­ful, pro­vid­ed not through a big cap­i­tal in­vest­ment. It brings to­geth­er da­ta con­nec­tiv­i­ty, se­cu­ri­ty, WiFi in one so­lu­tion with C&W Busi­ness pro­vid­ing sup­port. Small busi­ness­es can­not af­ford a CIO on their own," he said.

D'Oliviera said small busi­ness­es do not have to spend the mil­lions of dol­lars gov­ern­ments spend to in­stall IT sys­tems.

"These busi­ness­es do not need a high cost IT team to keep it run­ning. It is our job to en­sure that the ser­vices are al­ways avail­able all the time. That leaves them to fo­cus on their core busi­ness," he said.

Maduri said their ser­vice can as­sist in the for­ma­tion of new busi­ness­es

He drew ref­er­ence to Sil­i­con Val­ley in the Unit­ed States where he said start-up com­pa­nies do not need to spend mil­lions of dol­lars on their own da­ta cen­tre, servers and that kind of in­fra­struc­ture that they can sim­ply pur­chase.

"So from Work Place So­lu­tions there is a lot of ben­e­fit to busi­ness­es. It en­ables small busi­ness­es to form, to grow with­out all the grow­ing pains that come with it," he said.

Maduri said an­oth­er ser­vice they of­fer is Dis­as­ter Re­cov­ery Ser­vice, which is geared to larg­er busi­ness­es and gov­ern­ments.

"Com­pa­nies would lease space in an­oth­er da­ta cen­tre away from their main da­ta cen­tre, they would have to buy servers to repli­cate in­for­ma­tion to an­oth­er en­vi­ron­ment. So if their main en­vi­ron­ment goes down they have a back­up. It is ex­pen­sive. We have a sys­tem Dis­as­ter Re­cov­ery, and it is a ser­vice which al­lows com­pa­nies not to have to make large cap­i­tal in­vest­ment but to have busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity so that their da­ta is al­ways repli­cat­ed so they do not have to wor­ry. Al­so the ser­vice is eco­nom­i­cal," he said.

D'Oliveira said the lo­cal busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty has re­act­ed pos­i­tive­ly to their new ser­vice.

"There are over 15,000 SME cus­tomers in T&T of which we have about at least about 8,000 of them with our tra­di­tion­al ser­vices, in­ter­net and con­nec­tiv­i­ty and the ca­ble ser­vice. In our ex­ist­ing cus­tomer base there is a po­ten­tial," he said.

Maduri said they op­er­ate in the Caribbean re­gion, Latin Amer­i­ca and oth­er coun­tries world wide and some economies are do­ing well and oth­ers are not.

"There is a change un­der­way in busi­ness and it is mov­ing from a busi­ness mod­el where or­ga­ni­za­tions would spend cap­i­tal and in­vest. Twen­ty five per cent of the da­ta cen­ters in Colom­bia are out­sourced. I think in some cas­es this will ac­cel­er­ate be­cause of eco­nom­ic down­turn. Whether an econ­o­my is grow­ing at ze­ro per cent or five per cent there is noth­ing that is go­ing to stop the move­ment for the need for se­cu­ri­ty and net­work," he said.

D'Oliveira said there are no oth­er play­ers in the lo­cal mar­ket that has "all the pieces of the puz­zle."

"No one else owns the end-to-end process. We are the on­ly provider in the re­gion. We can­not see any one else get­ting close to that. The in­vest­ment we made since the ear­ly days of Colum­bus is build­ing our net­work in­fra­struc­ture that is not eas­i­ly repli­cat­ed," he said.

D'Oliveira, speak­ing at the of­fi­cial launch of C&W Busi­ness at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, said 2015 is al­ready shap­ing up to be an­oth­er "record break­ing" year for them.

"We have en­joyed ex­po­nen­tial growth in mar­ket share in every ma­jor sec­tor. What is even more im­pres­sive is that 65 per cent of our en­ter­prise cus­tomers have con­tin­ued to deep­en their re­la­tion­ships with us by ex­tend­ing the scope of their con­tracts be­yond tra­di­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty ser­vices to in­clude a full suite of our IT man­aged ser­vices," he said.

He said over the next cou­ple of months they will com­plete their net­work build out across To­ba­go and their LTE cel­lu­lar net­work through­out the en­tire coun­try.

"We have al­ready start­ed to staff these op­er­a­tions, and ex­pect to in­crease our head count to more than 300 lo­cal jobs over the next 18 months. This is sig­nif­i­cant in­crease from the 13 peo­ple we had when we launched our ICT busi­ness ser­vice three years ago.

"Next year, we will com­plete the con­struc­tion of the largest Tier-3 DC fa­cil­i­ty in the Caribbean, which will be in­te­grat­ed in­to our re­gion­al DC Ecosys­tem, to de­liv­er our high­ly avail­able IT man­aged ser­vices, across our world-class re­dun­dant re­gion­al net­work back­bone."

Half-year re­sults

Last Thurs­day, CWC CEO Phil Bent­ley spoke with re­gion­al jour­nal­ists via a live we­b­cast fol­low­ing re­lease of the com­pa­ny's lat­est in­ter­im fi­nan­cial re­sults in Lon­don.

Over­all, CWC re­port­ed earn­ings be­fore in­ter­est, tax­es, de­pre­ci­a­tion and amor­ti­sa­tion of US$427 mil­lion and has raised its cost-sav­ings tar­get to US$125 mil­lion from US$85 mil­lion.

"We re­main on track with our three-year plan and are con­fi­dent our busi­ness mod­el will de­liv­er sig­nif­i­cant long-term share­hold­er val­ue cre­ation. We are al­so rolling out high-speed da­ta net­works in our mar­kets and passed an ad­di­tion­al 33,400 homes with 832 kilo­me­tres of fi­bre dur­ing the half whilst up­grad­ing 53,000 cus­tomers in Bar­ba­dos from lega­cy net­works," he said.

Ac­cord­ing to in­ter­na­tion­al news re­ports, John Mal­one's ca­ble em­pire Lib­er­ty Glob­al is in talks to­wards a �3.7 bil­lion takeover of Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (CWC), the Lon­don-list­ed Caribbean tele­coms op­er­a­tor.

CWC, the re­main­ing in­de­pen­dent op­er­a­tions of the for­mer glob­al gi­ant Ca­ble & Wire­less, con­firmed it was dis­cussing a po­ten­tial cash and shares of­fer.

Mal­one is al­ready a ma­jor share­hold­er in CWC af­ter it last year ac­cept­ed shares in ex­change for con­trol of his Caribbean ca­ble op­er­a­tion Colum­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions.