Telstra Sets up Innovation Centres in India to Counter AI, IoT Challenges
Australian telecom major Telstra launches two new Innovation and Capabilities Centres (ICC) in Pune and Hyderabad and a Network and Product Engineering Lab in Bengaluru. With this strategic move Telstra eyes to align its vision towards harnessing talent, driving excellence in innovation, building future skills, and nurturing new capabilities. These state of the art facilities with a combined size of more than 100,000 sq. ft would become hubs of innovation and would further reinforce Telstra’s efforts to diversify talent acquisition in India.
N T Arunkumar, MD and country head (India) and head of innovation - Telstra India says, “At Telstra India, our ambition is to be an epicenter of talent and innovation that drives Telstra’s digitally connected future. Our expansion in India reiterates our commitment to empower an innovative ecosystem by providing relevant opportunities to our people, co-creating with partners to bring alive cutting edge technology and solutions for our businesses and customers.”
ICC in Hyderabad is likely to serve as a hub of specialised high-performance software engineering (HPSE). It would encompass a deep technology consumer software engineering team that would directly innovate for the customers of Telstra. Likewise, the Pune centre would have a blend of operations and technology teams who would focus on improving Telstra’s existing domain expertise in the telecom business. They would also work on developing application software engineering to enable business process change.
With the launch of its engineering lab in Bengaluru, Telstra becomes one of the first multinational telecom companies to open a Network and Product Engineering Lab in India to accelerate innovation in next-gen mobile technology testing. The state of the art 8500 sq. ft lab will specialise in creating an end-to-end 4G and 5G environment where testing of 4G/5G mobile handsets and IoT devices of various Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will take place. Some of the other focus areas of the lab include testing devices on 5G network in a virtual environment, developing software for smart devices, testing multiple devices among others.
Arunkumar further adds, “Our expansion puts us in a very strong position to deliver on our ambitions, enable our employees to have the flexibility to work from any of the three locations of their choice and further strengthen the resilience of our operations.”
Telstra opened its first ‘Innovation and Capability Centre’ (ICC) in Bengaluru in July 2019 to bring together talented Telstra and partner employees to focus on innovation, experimentation and process improvements.
Since the inception of the Bengaluru ICC, the company has employed software network professionals who are part of the futuristic technology innovations at Telstra. The new ICCs in Pune and Hyderabad would be the second and third centres after Bengaluru. Telstra is headquartered in Australia with points of presence across 22 other nations.
It is offering a full range of communications services and competing in all telecommunications markets. In Australia, it provides 18.8 million retail mobile services, 3.8 million retail fixed bundles and standalone data services and 960,000 retail fixed standalone voice services.
Over the last 12-15 months, Telstra has been building core network and product engineering capabilities by investing in more than 250 people in India. They would be involved in various core engineering capability build-up, various IoT use case development and broadening the engineering capabilities across the entire domain.
“In the coming months, we will be doubling our capability and also plan to leverage the partner ecosystem for joint collaboration,” says Arunkumar.
