You’re Formula 1’s communications partner. What does the role entail?

We deliver a whole stack of services to them [the Formula 1 group]. We connect their offices in the U.K. with all the racetracks which are part of the Grand Prix. On top of that, they run a lot of their services—including voice, data, and video—and that allows them to do things like remote operations. So they have the ability, with a little joystick, to manage video cameras, and listen in to radio edits [which are done from the U.K.] while the race is happening in any part of the world. Then there is a stack of IT infrastructure services. For example, their website runs on our private cloud offering; we also give them a range of cybersecurity services.

Then if you look at the Mercedes team, each car has 150-200 sensors, generating thousands of data points in real time. We help them take real-time strategic decisions on whether they should pit, whether they need a tyre change, whether the driver needs to drive a different racing line—all the information that comes from the car, we help them take it back to their racing headquarters in Brackley (in the U.K.), and then the remote teams are able to make strategic calls.

The third part of the ecosystem is broadcasters like Sky Sports. For Sky Sports to run their Ultra HD feeds and their own remote operations, they have their hub in the U.K., which produces the feed for their channels. We allow them to create the whole package.

Weren’t you essentially an enterprise service provider before you entered sports technology?

Seven years back, we connected the globe. We were the world’s largest wholly-owned submarine cable network. We could provide a whole layer of connectivity services and voice services. What we have done in the last few years is that we are shaping ourselves into being a digital infrastructure services provider.

The foundation of the global reach and scale of what we can do at the collective level on top of it now creating business applications—whether it is collaborations, whether it is cloud services, whether it is security, whether it is mobility services, or IoT—we’ve been able to take the whole package and take it to our customers globally. The journey has helped us to mature from a global connectivity services provider to a global digital infrastructure services provider.

What other sports are you involved in, besides Formula 1?

We thought that if we could do it for Formula 1, we could do it for any sport. So we do a whole range of sporting properties now—having developed what we could do at Formula 1—whether it is MotoGP, European PGA, the Pro Kabaddi League, or IPL and working with Star Sports to help do production.

We help Star Sports redefine the way production happens in India. What we are helping them with is our ultra-low latency TV networks, they can connect stadiums across the country to their production hub, where they are able to create feeds such as in regional languages, and able to do remote production.

sky sports

Tata Communications’ high-speed dash for Formula 1