Airtel Business, IBM deploy hybrid cloud solution for milk companies

The technology will enable the firms to strengthen support to farmers and securely record and access key information.

Airtel Business, the B2B unit of the telecom company, and IBM announced on Wednesday a collaboration to deploy hybrid cloud solution for a group of five milk producer companies (MPCs).

The cloud solution, by leveraging Airtel Cloud and IBM Power servers, will accelerate the digital transformation of the MPCs. These large MPCs comprise Paayas in Rajasthan, Maahi in Gujarat, Shreeja in Andhra Pradesh, Baani in Punjab, and Saahaj in Uttar Pradesh.

It will enable the MPCs to strengthen support to milk farmers and securely record and access key information. The MPCs will be able to make direct and timely digital payments to over 500,000 affiliated milk farmers. Of the over 500,000 farmers supported by the MPCs, most farmers are from small or marginal income groups, with a maximum of women entrepreneurs contributing up to 25 lakh litres of milk each day from more than 14,000 villages.

For companies without their own data centres, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model can provide an inexpensive, fast, fundamental system that can scale up or scale-out as required. This model tends to work well for businesses that need scalable workloads and control over their data.

"Clients are looking for solutions that are scalable and secured. Through the joint value proposition, we have offered producer companies a modern and secured data centre infrastructure to run their data-intensive workload on a hybrid cloud platform in a very cost-effective manner,” said Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, chief executive officer of Enterprise Business, Airtel Business, which is a unit of Bharti Airtel.

"We are witnessing a considerable surge in demand for highly secured and cutting-edge digital technology from enterprise and government organizations. IBM and Airtel will collaborate and complement each other's capabilities to address the growing needs of digital transformation of enterprises in India," said Ravi Jain, director - server sales, IBM India/South Asia.