Pan-African telecommunications firm Seacom has gained better-than-expected momentum in its quest to grow its enterprise segment, with the well received establishment of the second unit opening up the East African market.
The business unit, which launched its full set of business offerings to the South African market more than a year ago, now has 25 employees across Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, growing its direct and indirect client base to around 1 000 customers – 90% of whom are in South Africa.
Seacom aims to meet the basic needs of corporate connectivity, cloud services, security and Voice over Internet Protocol, besides others, noted Seacom business head Grant Parker, adding that the company is surpassing its aggressive targets.
Not wanting to be “everything to everyone”, Seacom aims to differentiate its approach to the enterprise segment by continuing to invest in the newest technology and to develop global partners.
“We are seeing good uptake,” he told media during a business update at Seacom’s headquarters, in Fourways, on Wednesday.
Seacom Business has grown its base of channel partners under an agent or reseller model and is now servicing around 70% to 80% of its business market to more than 120 channel partners in South Africa and ten in Kenya, aggregately processing around 100 new service orders each month from business customers.
The East Africa unit, servicing the region, including Uganda, Mozambique and Tanzania, was launched in Kenya in August this year and now accounts for 10% of the corporate market customers.
To date, Seacom has connected 50 nodes and will continue to seek out connectivity partners to “reach more corners of the market” and provide dedicated, high-speed and low-latency access to the Internet directly from Seacom’s network, points of presence and partner networks.
Initially, the company aims to bring standard fibre to corporate customers in Kenya and South Africa and will focus on leasing, acquiring or building further capacity in line with its needs, with last-mile fibre a major focus for Seacom in the corporate market.
Seacom CEO Byron Clatterback said that acquisitions and partnerships will be pursued to gain scale and expedite growth.
“[In this game], either you acquire or you are acquired. We are now mandated and are looking for opportunities to expand not only directly, ourselves, and through partnerships, but actually through acquisitions as well,” he said.
The service provider business remains Seacom’s biggest business “by far”, generating the largest portion of revenue and largest portion of traffic.
However, it has enabled the company to drive scale and bolster enterprise offerings.
“We [remain] focused on the markets we are [already] in, because, to drive scale, you need to have fibre and we build everything on fibre, with the ability to move into neighbouring markets,” Clatterback pointed out.
He added that Seacom would launch in several markets this year and that the company would work with partners to connect its fibre to their markets.
This was in line with Seacom’s ambitions of driving volume and capabilities that could be tailored and built to meet the needs of enterprise customers.