Bharti Airtel launches sovereign cloud platform to power Indian telcos

The telecom major will now compete with US players like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google

India’s second-largest telecom services provider, Bharti Airtel, on Monday launched a sovereign, telecommunications-grade Cloud platform, Airtel Cloud, to help Indian companies reduce their cloud expenditure while ensuring that data remains within the country.

 

The Sunil Mittal-promoted carrier will offer the platform through its wholly owned subsidiary, Xtelify, which will provide Airtel Cloud to other telecom operators via a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model.

 

Alongside the Cloud offering, the company launched an AI-powered software suite designed to improve customer experience, reduce churn, and raise average revenue per user (Arpu), a key profitability metric for telecom firms.

 

Among its first contract wins, Xtelify has signed up with Singapore’s leading telecom operator Singtel (also a shareholder in Bharti Airtel), Airtel Africa, which operates in 14 African countries, and Globe Telecom of the Philippines. With this launch, Bharti Airtel will now compete directly in the Cloud services market, currently dominated by US players like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google. 

 

 

“Within Airtel, we have been actively harnessing digital innovations at unmatched scale to transform our services and enhance customer experience at Airtel for many years now. This has involved powering over 590 million customer touchpoints and solving some of the most complex telecom challenges in the world. All this is enabled by Airtel Cloud where all our applications run at a very compelling cost,” said Gopal Vittal, vice-chairman and managing director of Bharti Airtel.

 

He said Xtelify’s bundled network and Cloud offerings can save up to 40 per cent of the cost that is typically incurred by companies if they were to deploy their own network as well as Cloud platforms.

 

The platform consists of four key products -- Xtelify Data Engine, Xtelify Work, Xtelify IQ, and Xtelify Serve -- which offer AI-driven insights, workflow automation, telecom journey management, fleet optimisation, automated task management, and real-time tracking and governance. Additional services include spam and fraud protection for telecom customers.

 

In Singapore, Singtel Xtelify will be available for its field teams as a plug-and-play enterprise grade AI service. According to Singtel Singapore Chief Executive Officer Ng Tian Chong, the solution is expected to streamline workflows, boost productivity, strengthen governance, and reduce the overall carbon footprint by improving dispatch and resource management.

 

The control of Airtel Cloud will reside within India so that no external entity can access any part of this data or its working, Vittal said. The indigenous platform will be hosted in next-generation Indian data centres.

 

According to a report last week, Bharti Airtel, under its data centre arm Nxtra, is aggressively expanding its data centre capacity, with an investment of nearly ₹6,000 crore planned over the next three to four years. The data center capacities will be crucial for supporting Airtel Cloud, which can reportedly handle up to 1.4 billion transactions per minute.

 

Bharti Airtel’s move to offer Cloud services to other telecom operators is seen as a strategy to boost revenue, particularly as Arpu in India remains stagnant despite three tariff hikes over the past three years. India’s Arpu continues to lag far behind the average across the European Union and the US.

 

As of the March 2025 quarter, Airtel’s enterprise business stands at 11 per cent of overall revenue, though the Airtel Business segment declined marginally to ₹5,315 crore. Airtel is scheduled to announce its June quarter results on Tuesday.

 

Apart from Airtel, Reliance Jio is implementing AI-based services under the ‘Jio Brain’ initiative within the group companies, which can train and apply machine learning models at the network edge and in the service provider Cloud, people aware of the developments said. They added that as the use cases expand, the service would be offered to enterprises outside the group.