Bharti Airtel, CISCO ink pact to cater B2B market

Bharti Airtel and Cisco today announced a strategic business alliance to create products and services for the small, medium and large enterprises.    

The alliance would combine the strengths of Airtel's network service and Cisco' Internet Protocol (IP) technologies, expertise to create and sell a set of products and services-including managed data services, hosted unified communications, connected branch services and Cisco TelePresence.

Airtel and Cisco would appoint a team led by Sanjay Mittal, senior vice-president, Bharti Airtel, to develop and manage these services to fulfill requirements of customers across SMBs and large enterprises, Manoj Kohli, CEO and joint managing director of Bharti Airtel, told reporters here.

"From the B2C market where we already have a leadership, we are shifting focus to B2B market comprising large enterprises, medium enterprises and over 6 million small and medium enterprises", he said adding "timing of the pact is important as the Indian economy is on the threshold of a major B2B growth".    

Wim Elfrink, chief globalisation officer and executive vice-president, Cisco Services, said: "Building on Indian Government's commitment to rapid broadband deployment of 700 million broadband customers in next five years, we will together create and deliver transformational services for large enterprise and small and medium-sized businesses".

"With this allinace we will expand our market coverage in the rapidly growing managed services market and simplify purchase process for our mutual customers by facilitating joint sales, partner planning and customer engagements", Kohli said.    

"The products and services offered by this alliance will incorporate Cisco technology with the Airtel network to target the burgeoning Indian managed service market, which is expected to grow from the present $1.1 billion to $4 billion by 2013," Naresh Wadhwa, president and country manager, Cisco India said.    

"We are looking at capturing a large share of this $4 billion market", he said.