Dr. Arosha Fernando is the Director / CEO of Sierra Global Network Private Limited, one of the leading telecommunications infrastructure development companies in Sri Lanka. Dr. Arosha is having five university degrees from Australia along with 16 years of experience in the telecommunication industry both in Australia and Sri Lanka. In an interview with The Bottom Line Dr. Arosha talk about his views on current trends in the industry as well as current business strategies.

Q: How do you see the growth of your business especially considering global recession and current negative economic climate?

A: The outlook for the future appears positive so far. I feel telecom market in Sri Lanka will continue to deregulate and the number of operators and their services will continue to grow by investing millions of dollars in network and infrastructure in order to improve their service capacity and coverage. With the increase in number of operators and increase in expansion projects of existing operators, the demand for turnkey service provider has also increased.

The services segment of the telecommunications industry is experiencing tremendous growth since recent past. Operators are continued to invest in network and infrastructure in order to improve operations and create a competitive advantage. The increasingly competitive telecommunications market, both wireline and wireless has increased operators’ awareness of the importance of focusing on their core businesses rather than spending their time on developing their network or infrastructure. As a result, operators are in need of partners as turnkey services providers such as Sierra Global.

Q: What consist of turnkey services in telecom?

A: Turnkey telecommunications services encompass a broad range of applications and services. Although definitions vary, turnkey telecommunications services solution typically include planning of the network, acquisition of sites, installation of equipment, testing and integration, infrastructure development, logistics and asset management, network management and optimization of the network, project management and operations and maintenance support. Increasingly, these services are becoming more interdependent and operators are beginning to realize how important a world-class telecommunication turnkey solution provider as a partner to effectively face the competition.

Sierra Global has focuses these needs in well advance and currently well positioned as the leader on providing turnkey solutions for telecommunication projects in Sri Lanka.

Q: What are your main activities?

A: Sierra Global is unique in it’s service offering as it’s the only organisation in Sri Lanka that has end-to-end capabilities in delivering any type of infrastructure development services to any of the telecommunication operators in Sri Lanka.

During past 5 years we have been working for all the 10 telecommunication operators in Sri Lanka covering the 5 of GSM mobile operators – Dialog Telekom, Mobitel, Hutch, Tigo and recently launched Bharti Airtel as well as 5 of the CDMA operators – SLT, Suntel, Lanka Bell, Dialog Broadband and Tritel. We have also undertaken number of overseas projects including the first commercial GSM Network for LiberCell in Liberia, Western Africa and number of switching expansion work for Dihraagu in Maldives.

Through our wholly owned subsidiary, EXi Lanka Private Limited we have transferred engineering teams to UK for period of 9 months to work for British Telecom, One-to-One and Vodafone projects. They have also been transferred to Malaysia and Maldives to work for projects over there. Further we have been supplying resources to Ericsson India for its Projects with Bharati Telecom and Hutchison India in the past.

Q: What is your key focus?

A: We are focusing on operators and telecom equipment vendors by providing full featured, scalable and reliable services and service at competitive prices. We will continue to develop our low cost, high-quality services in Sri Lanka and selected overseas countries which provides significant cost advantages over our competitors.

Q: What the key achievements of the company?

A: We have installed and commissioned the first CDMA Network in Sri Lanka with Huawei Technologies Limited of China towards Lanka Bell. We were the first people to get trained in CDMA technology even before it was tested in Sri Lanka market.

We have completed the first 100 sites in SLT CDMA Project for ZTE Corporation of China in the shortest recorded time in Sri Lanka.

We were the first company in Sri Lanka to get the site acquisition outsourced from telecom operators, initially from Hutch followed by Lanka Bell, Suntel, Mobitel, Airtel and more recently from Dialog.

Further, we were the first company that a telecommunication operator decided to outsource their International Roaming activities on turn-key basis and we have successfully implementing these services for Hutch now as an outsourced managed service.

We undertook the first full turn-key telecommunication project in Sri Lanka from site acquisition up to site development (civil construction), installation and commissioning of telecommunication equipment as well as all the logistics (custom clearing, warehousing, inland transportation to sites). This is Hutch GSM Project, stage 3 contracted to us by ZTE Corporation of China.

We have commissioned the first commercial WAP gateway in the region at Dialog Telekom.

I trust these are few of our achievements and currently we are focussing on number of new areas of business in our expansion process where we hope to add more achievements in to our list.

Q: What are your future strategies in expanding the business further ?

A: I would like to leverage on Sierra’s goodwill in the telecommunication market for its quality, fast response and cost effective services solutions to expand its business and operational activities in Sri Lanka as well as in selected overseas markets over the next few years. In the next few years, Sierra Global would expect to find financial sources such as banks, financial institutes, venture capitalist and other partnerships depending on the nature of the projects and its financial terms to strength its capabilities to compete in the highly competitive market. Our scope of business development for future is to focus on strategic markets, accounts, alliances, channel development, mergers and acquisitions.

Q: We understand your organisation involved in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities?

A: I am a strong believer in CSR as I trust we have an obligation towards the society. Recently we have sponsored the CCC International Under 14 Cricket Tournament where number of overseas countries as well as players from all the districts of Sri Lanka participated. We have also given 10 scholarships and renovated the ‘Special Education Unit’ of Wadduwa Central College, and I hope my organization to get involve in more of the similar activities in the future.

Q: What is your vision?

A: I always try to drive my organisation to work very closely with the customers to ensure that a seamless service is provided to them based on their requirements.

I don’t like to see my organisation as a supplier, contractor or service provider but as a ‘partner of choice’ of our customers where we can work together in building their business. My vision is to fully achieve these with any of my customers.