Bharti Airtel inks multi-year strategic pact with Amazon for AWS solutions

Bharti Airtel on Wednesday announced a multi-year strategic pact with Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the cloud services arm of the retail giant – to deliver Cloud solutions to large as well as small and medium enterprise (SME) customers in India.

Puneet Chandok, president, commercial business, India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services, said it is a 50:50 strategic partnership.

“This collaboration gives customers a single point of contact when dealing with complex migrations or custom-built solutions. Airtel has demonstrated a strong commitment to our shared customers, and we look forward to continue working with it to bring innovative solutions to the market,” Chandok said.

According to the IDC Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker – Forecast 2019 H2 – the public Cloud services market in India is likely to touch $7.1 billion in 2024, rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.3 per cent from $3.4 billion in 2020.

In addition, Airtel Cloud will leverage AWS' innovation and transformation services across analytics, data warehousing, Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning (ML) to help customers adopt new services and migrate to the Cloud from legacy infrastructure.

Harmeen Mehta, CIO and head of Cloud and Security Business at Bharti Airtel, said, “This collaboration brings AWS, the world's leading Cloud platform, together with Airtel's deep reach and proven expertise in handling network, data centres, security, and Cloud as an integrated solution.”

Airtel serves over 2,500 large enterprises and more than one million emerging businesses and companies with an integrated product portfolio. It includes Airtel Cloud, a multi-Cloud product and solutions business, the company said in a statement.

Airtel Cloud will build an AWS CloudPractice, supported by AWS Professional Services, as well as develop differentiated Cloud products and capabilities leveraging AWS services, Airtel's data centre capabilities and network and telecoms offerings, it added.

“Airtel customers will benefit from an integrated sales, consulting, and support approach from both companies, and improved security, scalability, and Cloud management capabilities. Airtel Cloud will offer customers a range of AWS services, including Windows on AWS, SAP on AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS, database migration, and security as well as risk governance solutions," it further said.