Sanjay Krishnaa

Sanjay Krishnaa has been associated with Cyient for the past 17 years. He is currently based in Australia and dons two hats at the company: one as Senior Vice President and global head for communications business, and the other as President, Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. In an interview with tele.net, Krishnaa talks about the upcoming trends in the sector as well as the successes and challenges of his professional journey. Excerpts…

What are your current responsibilities at Cyient?

I joined Cyient Limited in Hyderabad late 2000 (erstwhile Infotech Enterprises) and have been associated with Cyient since then. The journey of these 17 years has been very rewarding and gratifying. As the President for the Asia Pacific, I have the fiduciary responsibilities for our businesses in the region. We have 11 offices serving some large customers in the region, and in my role as Senior Vice President, Communications BU, I have the P&L responsibility in managing and growing communication business globally. This includes growing our current markets, looking at new markets for growth, building a strong eco system, partnerships, acquisition and defining strategy for next level growth.

What trends do you foresee in the telecom sector?

The telecom industry is witnessing tremendous technological disruption, which they haven’t witnessed for a long time, I guess. This possibly is the only industry that is witnessing this sort of disruption and the challenging part for CSP’s is to keep up to this pace and still be competitive and be ahead of the game. The increased competition with their peer members and at the same time competing with OTP has become very challenging. What we could see in the near future would be consolidation globally and I won’t be surprised if we see few CSP players in each market than what we see today.

The focus for CSP’s is to upgrade their technologies, keep up to the demand of bandwidth although they don’t make much money out of it these days from B2C. The shift that we could see moving forward will be around focussing more on the enterprise business. This is where we could see CSP’s playing a role like technology companies offering services and solutions around telecommunication and more importantly around new technologies such as Cloud, IOT, SDN etc.

While 5G is still bit far away, the investments around small cell deployment will pick up the pace, similarly the fibre roll out will be their biggest investments now and in coming years.