My name is Ankur Jindal and I’m the VP and Global Head of Corporate Venturing and Innovation at Tata Communications. We’re a leading provider of global digital infrastructure services, offering integrated, globally managed tech solutions that underpin the fast-growing digital economy. We’re based in Mumbai, India, and are part of the Tata Group.
We joined the Hedera Governing Council in August of 2019. As a member of the council, we’re also part owner of the Hedera Hashgraph LLC during our council term. The term limits for governing council members are built in to ensure ongoing decentralization. Our charter as an initial member is to make decisions that grow network usage, the developer community, and adoption. We’re also running a Hedera node using our own infrastructure, researching application use cases, and beginning to build proof-of-concept applications.
Tata Communications is at the forefront of technological change and digital transformation. We understand how disruptive distributed ledger technologies and infrastructure are going to be for our industry — they’ll transform how our customers operate, through a range of applications and use cases.
We joined the Hedera Governing Council to have a seat at the table and help shape what we believe is the next-generation of public internet infrastructure that will touch nearly every industry. We’re keen on understanding, in conjunction with other Council members across a variety of industries, how public distributed ledgers can transform the way we do business.
We recognize that through this collaboration, we can help spur the adoption of this technology for the benefit of our customers and the global digital economy at-large.
The Hedera governing council activities have been a great way for us, as owners, to help shape the direction of network features, the codebase, and more. We want to do our part to move things in a direction that supports the needs of the Hedera developer community and businesses (which includes our internal teams). It’s been exciting to learn about the transformational potential of Hedera’s network services, while taking part in debates around important network and governance issues.
While we participate in Hedera Governing Council in the broad sense, we also participate in both the Product and Technology committees. These two committees are where a majority of application use cases are discussed, and critical decisions made with regards to the Hedera product roadmap and network development. We also participate in the Membership and Growth committees which assist in proposing ideas and making decisions around council member recruitment, while ensuring healthy growth of the Hedera developer and application ecosystem.
As a member of the Council, we’re required to host one of the initial network nodes. We’ve chosen to utilize our own infrastructure for running the Hedera node, rather than hosting it in a public cloud. This not only ensures decentralization of the Hedera mainnet, but also offers us flexibility in our node management and configuration.
The Tata Communications mainnet node is hosted in our highly secure, tier 1, US West Coast data center. It’s connected to our global tier 1 IP backbone, which carries roughly 30% of the world’s internet routes, allowing the United States to connect with other data centers in APAC, India, Middle East and Africa, and Europe. Tata Communications is utilizing its own 24x7 managed support on this node to meet the performance and availability needs of the Hedera network.
In our research into utilizing Hedera Hashgraph for use cases both internally at Tata Communications, as well as for our customers, we’ve found security to be an obvious area of focus. We believe user authentication, as well as verifiable logs for transactions or activities, can take advantage of Hedera Consensus Service (HCS). We see HCS’s ability to process high-throughput enterprise workloads with verifiable timestamps and ordering, using the trust of a public network as a key advantage over other technologies in this space.
Another potentially interesting application use case, specifically for the telecommunications industry, could be an automated system for international roaming settlements to reduce fraud. We’re always thinking about new ways to leverage the power of Hedera Hashgraph.
Overall, being a member of the Hedera Governing Council has been fascinating with the cross-industry perspectives of distributed ledger use cases beginning to emerge. We’re excited to help reshape enterprise IT security in the not-too-distant future, with Hedera Hashgraph playing a major role.