Reliance Communications To Launch Yipes Services

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NEW DELHI: Reliance Communications (RCom), which had acquired US-based Yipes Holdings last year, has decided to rebrand the company as ‘Reliance Global Services’. Yipes is a provider of managed Ethernet services in the US.

RCom will also introduce Yipes services in India in addition to developing channel partners to sell Yipes services in Middle East, Europe and Asia. In December 2007, RCom obtained the FCC approval and completed the acquisition of Yipes for about Rs 1,200 crore.

The company will also integrate the management of Yipes with that of its undersea cable arm, Flag Telecom. According to Flag Telecom’s group president, Punit Garg, following the completion of the acquisition, RCom over the next 12 months plans to ‘more than double Yipes’ network in he US from the current 14 key metros to fully address the $4billion demand in 2008’.

Currently, Yipes has over 22,000 km of optical fibre across these 14 cities with clients such as include Verizon and NTT DoCoMo. Yipes already boasts of over 1,000 enterprise data customers in the US, including New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

RCom is also confident about Yipes potential to bring in increased revenues: “Global Ethernet is the preferred means of connectivity for business due to its ‘plug and play’ technology and security features. As per market data, Global Ethernet is the fastest growing segment of the data services market, projected to climb to $30.7 billion by 2012,” says Mr Garg.

Ethernet products help firms compress and transfer data across cities or geographies efficiently. Put simply, Ethernet products are a network of hardware — switches and routers – that facilitate data connectivity across geographies.