Tata Communications' wholly owned Africa based subsidiary Neotel has entered into exclusive discussions with Vodafone owned Vodacom. Neotel provides value-added voice, internet and data services for businesses, wholesale network operators and providers and retail customers, and connects the major centres in South Africa to each other and to the world, directly linking its infrastructure into Tata Communications’ network. Its fibre network of over 15000 km spans Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Cape Town, Pietermaritzburg, Port Elizabeth and traverses approximately 30 other cities, towns and villages in South Africa. More here. Bharti Airtel has hived off its data centre and managed services business to Nxtra Data Ltd, its wholly owned subsidiary, via a slump sale, for no less than Rs 177.1 crore. The subsidiary provides Data Center and Managed Services, offering "Co-location, Managed Services, Managed Hosting, Managed Back-up & Storage, Managed Security, Virtual Compute and IaaS Cloud", and owns "seven operational Tier III/+ & ISO 27001 compliant Data Centers across India at Noida (2 nos.), Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Bhubaneswar and Mumbai comprising approx. 150,000 sq. ft. of potential revenue generating floor space." The slump sale of the business does not include the land and the building, but does include current contracts, engagements and purchase orders etc. with customers, rights, other assets, liabilities. All the identified employees of the DCMS Business are also being transferred. Why is Airtel doing this? "The overall market is forecasted to grow rapidly driven by demand for remote compute, storage and security services and products such as Hosted Private…
