The Hindu Business Line : Bharti to invest Rs 200 cr in enterprise biz unit — Plans tie-ups with IT majors to provide solutions to corporates

Info-Tech - Telecommunications

Bharti to invest Rs 200 cr in enterprise biz unit — Plans tie-ups with IT majors to provide solutions to corporates

Kripa Raman

Mumbai , Nov. 3

BHARTI Tele-Ventures will be investing Rs 200 crore over the next 12 months in its Airtel Enterprise business division that is intended to cater to around 800 - 1,000 large corporate customers.

The company is also aggressively pursuing tie-ups with organisations such as IBM, HP, Wipro, Microsoft, Cisco and Oracle to provide enterprise applications and solutions to these customers.

"This is our new approach to business — through a strategic alliance programme," said Mr Jai Menon, Joint President, Airtel Enterprise Services. "We will have multiple points of tie-up and have joint go-to-market plans."

Bharti had earlier awarded a 10-year $750 million IT outsourcing contract to IBM for managing its entire information technology needs, but this was completely for its own internal purposes, said Mr Menon.

Until now, Airtel was largely looking at the telecom needs of its customers, said Mr Menon. "But there are information technology needs as well, and telecom and IT functions don't talk to each other."

Through tying up with these IT majors, Airtel Enterprise plans to offer a single point of contact for both telecom as well as applications, he said. Revenues will come to Airtel and the partners will get a portion of the revenues.

The investment of Rs 200 crore will be spent on implementing Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology, on enhancing last mile fixed line access to enterprise customers, on data centres in four cities and in an Enterprise Network Operating Centre (NOC).

The enhancement of last mile access to enterprise customers could be through laying of copper or fibre, through wireless broadband (through deployment of 802.16 and even 802.20, some of the latest standards in wireless networking and an alternative to cable modem, leased lines, and other broadband network access technologies), through microwave and the like.

The four data server centres will be located in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. They are not just co-location servers but are referred to as offering `autonomic computing' outfits, "self-healing adaptive computer farms".

The NOC will be set up in the National Capital Region, most likely Gurgaon.

Apart from the entire range of telecom services (fixed line, mobile, satellite), Airtel Enterprise will also offer Managed e-business services, managed data and Internet services and managed customised integrated solutions.

In addition to this, operationally the company plans to deal with its customers along 12 industry verticals and is hiring people of domain expertise for the purpose. "For example, we have hired someone from Morgan Stanley for finance," said Mr Menon.

"We are re-engineering the entire enterprise," he said. By January 1, most of the processes will be in place. By April it shall be fully integrated.

"We expect a very sizeable portion of revenues to come from our enterprise business," said Mr Menon.