Vodacom Business aims to account for 25% of the Vodacom group’s service revenue within five years as it targets opportunities within the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) sector.

The business unit, which currently contributes 16%, or R8-billion, to the overall group’s revenue each year, plans to leverage its existing infrastructure to provide complete connectivity and communications services to the smaller business.

Vodacom Business CE Vuyani Jarana said the group was in a “good position” to deliver the benefits of a complete converged communications solution enjoyed by the bigger enterprise clients to SMEs, which were the backbone of the economy.

Vodacom Business’s R2-billion five-year infrastructure spend over the past few years had delivered the required scale to tackle the “huge and rapidly” growing SME segment, he commented.

The value of the telecommunications information technology industry was projected to reach R60-billion by 2015, Jarana said, adding that SMEs played a large role in this.

Over 90% of Vodacom Business’s 2 500 enterprise customers were directly connected through Vodacom’s own fibre network.

Further, owing to the expanded network and extensive submarine cable capacity, Vodacom Business provided a “99.995% network uptime guarantee” to customers.

“A side effect of Vodacom’s consumer business providing high-speed, high-capacity links to base stations is that we’ve been able to piggy-back off this expanded reach and can now offer enterprise solutions to smaller businesses as well,” Jarana added.

He said that with the group’s infrastructure and skills backbone reaching critical mass, it could tie in its fixed-fibre network with mobility, moving to convergence and total communications offerings for small business.

“We are quite advanced, in many aspects, in the Vodafone stable,” Jarana added, citing the group’s ability to locally expand and duplicate the product success the parent company has had in Europe and other regions.

In June, Vodacom launched the South African version of One Net Express, which had over two-million customers in Europe, providing SMEs significant cost savings in terms of call management.

The product offered businesses traditional switchboard or PBX features on their cellphones, and included several call management functions, such as hunt groups, auto attendant and the option to either port in or request a landline telephone number for their business.

Meanwhile, the unit would also focus on machine-to-machine, hosted and cloud services, with its four data centres across South Africa. The company was currently building a fifth data centre in Midrand.