TataCom sees healthcare as emerging vertical for data services

Tata Communications, which is betting big on data centre services, views healthcare as an emerging vertical and aims to achieve a growth rate of over 25% in the segment in next three years.

"... It's (data centre) a fast growing and fairly important piece to the IT infrastructure for many of the enterprises and that's why we see accelerated growth in data centre services.

"Tata Communications views healthcare as an emerging vertical with growth rates of over 25% for the next three years," company's Vice President (Global Product Management, Data Centre Services) C R Srinivasan told PTI.

He said in the cloud and virtualisation space, in terms of the number of virtual machines that a company deploys, there was a growth of over 60% last year.

As part of its solutions for the healthcare sector, the company has recently become an advisory partner to Nova Medical Centres.

"We have been developing our healthcare offerings and were thus able to enable services such as telemedicine and teleradiology using our network facilities and offering them on a hosted or cloud-based model.

"This opportunity has come about with us getting on the advisory board of Nova Medical Centres on account of our global data centres, on-demand managed services and connectivity solutions," Srinivasan said.

Asked if the company is in talks with other firms in healthcare space, he said the discussions with a couple of companies are at an advanced stage.

"Yes, at least a couple of them are at advanced stage of discussions with us, these are like hospital chains or clinics that are very similar to Nova Healthcare. We are also working to make sure that we understand the requirements from this domain very clearly and align our infrastructure services to support this healthcare vertical," he added.

Tata Communications has about 50 data centres at 44 locations.

"We have over a million square feet of space for our data centre equipment. All this space is cooled and powered, and we have a large team to support the leaders in operations," he added.