Bharti seeks tech-business strategy alignment

Bharti Tele-ventures has outlined major technology initiatives.

It is in talks with global IT giants such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Microsoft and India's Wipro to select a group of partners for the initiatives.

The new technologies will be aligned with Bharti's business strategy, and will help it adapt to change and scale up speedily in a cost-effective manner without sacrificing quality of service for the end customer.

In a response to a questionnaire from Business Standard, Jai Menon, corporate director, IT & Technology, Bharti Tele-ventures said: "Bharti uses the concept of macro architecture cube, a construct to integrate networks and information technology which will effectively align our business processes with technology."

Menon further added: "We are in the process of initial discussions and evaluation with our various partners like Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Microsoft, Wipro etc. to build our competency, functionalities and options around areas such as convergent intelligent network (CIN) and service delivery platform (SDP)."

Explaining the nuances of CIN and SDP, Menon said: "CIN is an overlay of intelligence layer on network elements at convergence of network and IT that include IN applications and this in effect manages the company's pre-paid offerings. On the other hand, SDP is an eco-system for aggregating, managing and rapidly deploying VAS (value added services) across the available channels on the Network agnostic to the bearer channel and delivery device. The endeavour is to develop the partner eco-system to build and support the MAC." It is also unlikely that BTV will be totally outsourcing the CIN and SDP components.

The company's Macro Architecture Cube has two more components - Networks and Classic Information Technology in addition to CIN and SDP.

"The Networks may be rendering services on three channels - voice, data and IP. This includes the switch networks, IP networks and the emerging network technologies like wCDMA, Edge, WiFi, WiMax, PwWAN etc." On the other hand Classic IT functions are deployed in a telecommunication environment to deliver the support (care, billing etc.) to the customer and manage revenue flows for the organisation. IT also facilitates the organisation interface to customer for any service request/query." It may be recalled Bharti has already outsourced the Classic IT to IBM and Networks to Ericsson and Nokia.