Tata Communications to Acquire BT Group's Mosaic Business

Earlier today, Tata Communications, a division of the Indian mega-conglomerate Tata Group (2007-8 estimated revenues of $70.8 billion USD), announced it will acquire British Telecom spin-off BT Mosaic. BT’s Mosaic division provides cloud-based services for content creation and content management for digital media.

On the company website, Tata Communications lists the following benefits of this move for Mosaic customers:

• Global access, control and management of media assets within the enterprise and throughout the supply chain with the ability to share, manage, repurpose and manage content on demand
• Time and focus to manage their content rather than being distracted by the diverse range of technologies underpinning their operations
• Rapid implementation leading to faster benefits delivery, creation and exploitation of media
• Reduced cost of ownership through lower overhead costs, rapid returns from projects and change programs, and an on-demand cloud-based commercial service
• Compressed creative cycles from production through to consumption
• Premium content delivered over Tata Communications’ global fiber backbone and CDN offerings

Here is the press release, submitted for your perusal…

London – January 18, 2010 – Tata Communications, a leading provider of a new world of communications, today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire BT Group plc’s (BT) Mosaic business, which offers an on-demand digital media management platform that manages content and workflow from production to distribution across collaborative market ecosystems.

The Mosaic business, with its service-oriented architecture, helps media customers improve cross-enterprise content creation, management and multi-format delivery. It enables enterprises to deliver innovative services that meet rapidly changing consumer demands, maintain and expand audience numbers and lower production costs. The new service is targeted at the entire spectrum of media customers encompassing production houses, emerging digital media publishers, content service providers, and TV channels.

“The acquisition of the Mosaic platform strengthens our global media and entertainment portfolio with powerful cloud-based digital media management applications that can be accessed over the Web. This enhances our existing portfolio of services that we are offering to the media and entertainment sector” said Vinod Kumar, President and COO, Tata Communications “By integrating our global network infrastructure and managed services portfolio, with Mosaic’s digital media management capabilities, we are now able to create a unique platform that can take care of content workflow from production to distribution across the world.”

“Although BT has sold Mosaic to Tata Communications, BT will continue to support its media customers through a sales channel agreement for Mosaic, particularly in the United States and Europe. BT remains fully committed to meeting the specific needs of our media customers worldwide,” said Mark Wilson-Dunn, director of BT’s Media and Broadcast division.

The value of the unaudited gross assets that are the subject of this transaction was £0.5 million at 30 September 2009.

For further information on Mosaic please visit: Mosaic.tatacommunications.com

About BT
BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services operating in 170 countries. Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to our customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband and internet products and services and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, Openreach, BT Retail and BT Wholesale.

In the year ended 31 March 2009, BT Group’s revenue was £21,390 million.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group plc and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group. BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York.