US analytics firm eyes growth in APAC region

Teoco, a US-based analytics service provider to telecom operators, plans to expand operations in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, through organic growth and acquisitions to become a global player, a top company fficial said Friday.

The 17-year-old Employee Owned Company (Teoco), promoted by an Indian entrepreneur, provides analytical solutions to telecom service providers mainly in North America and Europe with products developed at its software product development centres in the US, Israel and India.

"As the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region has the world's largest population (four billion), we see a huge opportunity to provide our products and solutions to telecom operators serving a growing number of customers using voice and data increasingly," Teoco chief executive Atul Jain told reporters here.

Though the $100-million company forayed into India in 2005 with an offshore development centre in Kolkata and expanded its operations to Bangalore in 2007 and Mumbai in 2010, it is looking for strategic acquisitions to widen its product-cum-service portfolio and client base to double its revenues over the next couple of years.

"Of the 700 employees we have, 150 are in India, 200 in Israel, 250 in the US and the remaining 100 in countries across Europe, Africa and Latin America where we have clients using our products and solutions. We will be ramping up the headcount through organic and acquisition routes to serve our increasing client base in the APAC and other emerging markets," Jain said.

The company's revenue grew substantially after acquiring the Israeli-based Schema, a radio access network optimisation (RAN) leader, for $9 million in 2012 and TTI Telecom, another Israeli-based service assurance solutions provider, for $58 million in 2010.

"Our products in network fault and performance management, RAN optimisation and big data analysis will be of valuable cost and performance differentiators to telecom operations in this (APAC) region," Jain said.

The company has 140 clients worldwide, including Indus Towers and Reliance in India.

"Though the addressable market worldwide is about $4 billion and growing rapidly, our revenue target is about $200-250 million over the next four-five years. We see immense potential in India for product innovation and business growth, as the country has the second largest number of mobile subscribers worldwide, which are moving up the value chain to data services from voice," Jain said.

Noting that big data analytics offered huge opportunities, he said telecom devices and appliances were capable of receiving massive volumes of data though the industry had not fully leveraged them to extract valuable information embedded in it (data).

"Our products and solutions are capable of analysing such rich data to provide better business intelligence solutions, as we have done it to largest telecom carries in the US, crunching hundreds of terabytes of data," Jain added.