Airtel, Amazon Web Services sign pact to offer cloud solutions to businesses

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel Ltd and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud services subsidiary of e-commerce giant Amazon.com, on Wednesday announced a strategic partnership to provide a basket of cloud solutions to large, small and medium businesses.

The partnership will enable Airtel and AWS integrate their capabilities to offer customers cloud services at a large scale. It will focus on developing products that secure remote working, which “many organisations have not taken seriously as of yet”, said Harmeen Mehta, Airtel’s chief operating officer (CIO) and head of cloud and security business.

Under the alliance, Airtel Cloud will build an AWS Cloud Practice supported by the latter’s expertise, and develop Airtel Cloud products leveraging AWS cloud solutions, Airtel’s data center, network and telecom offerings, the Sunil Mittal company said in a statement.

“Airtel customers will benefit from an integrated sales, consulting, and support approach from both companies, and improved security, scalability, and cloud management capabilities,” the statement added.

Airtel’s initiative with AWS will compete with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd and Microsoft partnership in a market that has been witnessing a surge in public cloud demand. According to consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG), India’s public cloud market is expected to reach $8 billion by 2023.

The public cloud market in India was worth $2.6 billion in 2019, said BCG, much higher than an estimate by research firm Gartner of $1.9 billion. This indicates that the country’s cloud-based working has been growing due to digital infrastructure.

Airtel has been widening its digital reach, with the covid-19 pandemic increasing the need for digital transformation and Jio Platforms Ltd, the digital services arm of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), announcing massive investments and initiatives in this space.

"This will leverage Airtel’s customer footprint and depth of AWS solutions. In future, this has the potential to develop India-specific solutions for manufacturing and other verticals such as Industry 4.0, IoT (internet of things) and help in transforming the Indian manufacturing landscape,” said Pareekh Jain, founder of Pareekh Consulting and EIIRTrend.

Recently, Bharti Airtel chief executive Gopal Vittal outlined a digital strategy to monetize demand across its digital assets from quality customers. The telecom operator has also started testing it adtech model, which has generated modest revenue.

Bharti Airtel, which is the largest player in the B2B connectivity space, has also launched a video conferencing service, Airtel BlueJeans, in partnership with US-based telecom giant Verizon Wireless. The service has been rolled out only for enterprises, and may be extended to individuals gradually, and will be free for the first three months.

Airtel serves more than 2,500 large, and over one million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and startups. To tap this market, the telco will offer Airtel BlueJeans to enterprises with different packages bundled with broadband and internet plans, CEO Vittal had said.