New phase of growth as Indigo builds on NOC and subsea success
Emerging market opportunities are opening up for Indigo in our 25th year of business, reflecting how global demand for the network infrastructure the company designs, deploys and supports continues to accelerate. According to Statista, market revenue in the sector is projected to reach €191bn this year, and reach €227.30bn by 2027. As business and consumer demand for bandwidth shows no sign of slowing down, the pressure is on service providers, not just to increase capacity but also to improve network efficiency.
Reflecting this demand, Indigo has seen our own revenues double since 2018, when a private equity investment from Growth Capital Partners (GCP) helped kickstart a period of sustained expansion through organic growth and acquisition. Full-time employees have increased over the same period to 400, but more significant than the number has been the recruitment of new skills and technical capabilities, opening doors to different kinds of customer engagement.
“We transitioned from delivering services to mainly telecommunications companies into providing services to any company with a network or data centre,” explained Ian Duggan, Indigo’s Chief Executive Officer. “Our strategy anticipated the evolution of the hyperscale market, where global tech and internet companies began to take ownership of the network infrastructure they depend upon to deliver their services and demanded new levels of operational efficiency.”
Adding technological skills
In 2018, an early iteration of Indigo’s NOC (Network Operations Centre) was opened at the company headquarters in Magor, South Wales. What started out as service desk became a state-of-the-art facility in 2021, providing network monitoring services for some of the world’s largest telcos and hyperscale tech companies. Leading-edge tools and data analytics offer proactive support, catching issues early before they lead to outages.
Building up security skills has been another development, responding to escalating network attacks with expert personnel and advanced threat detection tools in a dedicated Security Operations Centre.
We have developed an embedded security culture through awareness, education and empowerment to ensure we deliver a great customer experience.
Such has been the success of our network monitoring division that Indigo has opened a second NOC in the USA to support a telcos and hyperscale client’s operations in North and South America. More recently, the Welsh NOC was extended to provide systems operator support to subsea customers, a whole new area of business for Indigo. [more our Indigo’s subsea services] “Subsea has become very important to us, something that wasn’t even on our roadmap when GCP made the investment,” said Duggan. “It speaks to how flexible and agile we are when it comes to identifying an opportunity and going after it.”
New customers in the space include the Amitié cable system, the highest capacity transatlantic subsea cable system ever deployed. The 6,800km optical submarine cable connects the United States (Lynn) with the UK (Bude) and France (Le Porge). “Monitoring such a critical piece of infrastructure has elevated Indigo’s profile and given our brand real gravitas in the global market for network infrastructure,” said Duggan.
Relationships built on trust
At the same time, Indigo has been steadily growing a first-line maintenance business that started out 25 years ago, supporting European telcos and network equipment manufacturers. Today, field engineers in over 90 countries provide a ‘remote hands’ service to global operators, backed up with a super-efficient logistics operation to ensure the timely delivery of parts. The business has helped forge long-lasting relationships with operators as they built out our global networks.
Further growth
The success of the new ventures and an appetite for further growth continues.
Ask Ian Duggan why he expects Indigo’s rapid growth trajectory to continue and he puts it down to trust, the foundation for any outsource engagement. “Large telcos and hyperscalers want to focus on the core business that generates revenue and outsource the rest to third parties. Our business is predicated on fulfilling that role, by earning our client’s trust and never letting them down,” he said. “Add to that our ambition to extend our technical capabilities without compromising quality and it makes for a very successful formula.”
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