Telkom Kenya sets up enterprise division

Telkom Kenya has set up an enterprise division to develop products and enhance service delivery to corporate clients.

Buoyed by a capital injection from France Telecom, Telkom is already providing integrated IP-VPN (Internet Protocol-Virtual Private Network) solutions to one local bank based on Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS). France Telecom paid US$390 million for a 51 percent stake in Telkom in November last year.

"Telkom is providing enterprise services to one bank with multiple branches, we have a strong network and in nine months, the enterprise division will launch even more innovative products," said Njeri Rionge, chief commercial and marketing officer at Telkom.

In nine months, the enterprise division will expand and launch bundled offerings that include data services for GSM and CDMA networks, Rionge said. In the past, Telkom used to provide infrastructure to Internet service providers and customers, who would then develop their own VPNs over the Wide Area Network (WAN) supplied by Telkom. Telkom will now, however, provide complete packages.

While Rionge declined to name the bank that has engaged the enterprise division, she insisted that the bank has several branches and will benefit from the countrywide infrastructure of Telkom.

As Telkom is re-engineering, rebranding and overhauling its entire network and rebuilding an IP network to offer competitive services, the lessons learned from customers will allow it to offer better services, Rionge said.

France Telecom started its rebuilding of Telkom by changing the outlook from a public body to a commercial entity, and the next phase will be to update the legacy systems that are good and replace the ones overtaken by technology, Rionge said.

As part of the rebranding exercise, the enterprise division will reach out to other partners in the East Africa region and offer services across borders.

Njeri envisages that Telkom will initially focus on its home base, since Kenya is a tough market to enter and Telkom is already a vast network covering the whole country.

The enterprise division is expected to offer stiff competition to mobile-phone providers Safaricom and Zain, who are offering data and voice services to corporate customers.

Meanwhile, Telkom has discarded its ten-year-old logo and adopted a new logo with orange as the dominant color. The change of logo is expected to signal a new way of doing business, from a civil service to a more competitive commercial entity.

Apart from its new enterprise thrust, Telkom launched a new broadband service that will offer speeds of 512K bs at affordable rates. The service will be available all over the country.

In the past six months, Telkom has spent more than 5.5 billion Kenya shilling (US$82 million) on infrastructure and maintenance of projects involving digital services, CDMA rehabilitation and the upgrading of fixed networks and Information systems, said Dominique Saint Jean, Telkom Kenya's CEO. With the cash injection and the rebranding, Telkom Kenya joins the France Telecom group, which has operations in 15 countries in Africa.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.