S. Radhakrishnan
Founder & MD
An innovative leader in intelligent infrastructure, a mixture of designers, engineers and manufacturers that holds them apart from the traditional players in the market. Providing solutions on a global scale, being an Indian company and providing smart infrastructure solutions from past seven to eight years.
Headquartered in Gurugram, Flexsol believes in providing global quality at Indian cost to global customers. The organisation also concentrates on designing infrastructure that has societal linkage to people around. S. Radhakrishnan, further highlights Flexsol’s experience and the growth strides his firm has been taking to bring in new frontiers in the telecom market.
In conversation with S. Radhakrishnan, Founder & MD, SRK Tele Energy India Private Limited (Flexsol)
The Telecom industry is transforming at a rapid pace towards Data and Internet based users. How do you like to comment on that?
In last five years, industry has almost doubled in terms of users and quadrupled in terms of data usage per subscriber. Further to talk about non-human connections, IOT-connected devices currently stand at 7 Billion which are expected to triple by 2025 to 25 Billion connections. To achieve such a scale of expansion the network and infrastructure needs to be scaled to map the usage behaviour.
To enable the service to provide such huge data and with high quality of service, a lot of design on infrastructure side is required, which is not visible to end user. These infrastructure solutions are required to be deployed much ahead of time to offer better services to the end users.
How is Flexsol placed in this revolving Telecom Solution industry? And, in what ways is the company taking advantage of the above-mentioned trends?
Flexsol has always been an evolving company since its inception in 2004. We started as a pure services company for
active telecom equipment covering almost 50 percent of the country for a decade. During the same period, we were instrumental in introducing high-gain antennae in the Indian market through our Swedish manufacturing partner.
Way back in 2012, Flexsol’s design team was engaged by one of the leading global Network Equipment Provider (NEP) to design, develop and manufacture some of the unique solutions in micro cell infrastructure. We were the first to put up a "smart" telecom pole in 2014 in the country along with our global NEP partner right here in Mumbai.
Elaborate on the Telecommunication products and smart infrastructure designed and manufactured by the company that is immensely helping the Telecommunication operators while delivering their solutions.
Telecommunication operators and tower service providers have a big challenge in securing permission in dense urban locations and city centres to deploy telecom tower/poles. We, at Flexsol, have been working around this pain area of telecom service providers for over a decade. Our solution developed along with our global NEP partner, as well as Flexsol-owned designs, is primarily developed to achieve and convince the local authorities to grant approvals as they are aesthetically designed. Moreover, all our products are designed to be future ready to accommodate upcoming technologies.
Few of our products in Telecommunication are Smart Light Telecom Poles, Smart Enclosures, High Capacity dense urban poles and High Capacity IP Telecom Enclosures.
Flexsol is backed by a team of industry veterans who has immense knowledge and innumerable years of experience in the Telecommunication sector. Enlighten us in what ways the core team guided the company to transition from a purely tech reseller to a credible smart metal equipment provider in the Telecommunication sector?
Providing global quality at Indian costs has been our philosophy and that is the reason we today have global customers being served from us for their global requirements. We caught on the pulse of the industry for smart infrastructure early on and have been conceptualizing and designing smart poles for over 8 years now. We believe the telecom infrastructure should not only look better but also be of better use to the common people where such infrastructure is installed. Hence now we are more concentrated on designing infrastructure that has societal linkage to people around.
What are some of the challenges pertaining to the Telecommunication sector the company serves? In what ways is the company tackling those issues?
There are challenges for infra to be augmented in urban areas for telecom signals to reach inside the buildings. Networks need to be denser and more integrated with the urban surroundings. This is where our smart solutions help. Being a passive infra solution provider we are not restricted only to structural pole, we also design thermally and offer end to end with power.
Our new portfolio is to add smart elements as part of our complete offerings like Digital Display, Environmental Sensors, WiFi, Smart lights. As a step further to enhance our portfolio we have indigenously developed a common management platform and dashboard to manage the elements installed in various sites.
Flexsol’s design team was engaged by one of the leading global Network Equipment Provider (NEP) to design, develop and manufacture some of the unique solutions in micro cell infrastructure
Kindly provide us with a few success stories in which Flexsol successfully collaborated with its clients in meeting their requirements.
Flexsol through its partnership with Global NEPs have designed and deployed solution on street segment to both Global and Indian market. Designs have been conceptualised, designed and materialised jointly with the NEPs and being offered to the telecom operators or tower companies.
There are many references done jointly along with our NEPs, some of them are (i) New Delhi Municipal Corporation have permitted to deploy multifunctional smart telecom poles to increase the data and voice coverage and capacity in their geography. (ii) Bhopal Municipal Corporation allowed to install our solution to penetrate 4G and a ready infrastructure for futuristic 5G solution.
What is the future road map that has been envisioned for Flexsol?
The smart infra buildout has just started in India as well as globally. We would play an active role in developing and deploying the next generation of smart networks which will service the users in ways that are just evolving. With IOT around the corner, infrastructure buildout will need to be more efficient in every way and we see Flexsol playing a key role in that transition.