Bharti Airtel says enterprise becoming growth engine

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel’s enterprise, or `B2B arm’, will act as a major growth engine for which the company is digitising this business to spur growth and acquire new customers, a top executive said.
“There's a huge focus on the B2B part of the business. Data centers, managed services, cloud, security and IoT are a big growth engines for Airtel,” Ajay Chitkara, CEO of Airtel Business, told ET.

Bharti Airtel’s enterprise business for India -- Airtel Business - -reported Rs 2,992.5 crore revenue for the first quarter ended June 2018, up 7% on a yearly basis. Its enterprise customer base has also increased by 1.4% year-on-year.

“The process of making Bharti Airtel fully digital is not limited to the wireless part of the business alone, and we’ve extended it to our B2B side as well,” Chitkara explained.

Airtel aims to deliver every product riding on the digital platform for every segment and market to aggressively add new enterprise customers in India and in global markets as well. Having launched wholesale “voice on demand” to customers globally, the telco is now launching “bandwidth on demand” platform, aimed at international telcos, content companies, and start-ups.

“The digital approach has helped Airtel get more than 300 new customers in the last three months for the wholesale voice service in 30 countries. The acquisition machinery is very fast,” Chitkara said.

Airtel is making its latest bandwidth-on-demand product available in 19 locations, including LA, New York, Paris, London, Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong outside India. “Our locations in India are mainly around all the data centres in Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi,” Chitkara said.

The telco recently acquired the India leg of GBI’s India-Middle East-Europe submarine cable which will complement Airtel’s existing global cable network and add significant long-term bandwidth capacity.

The latest platform has been built on Airtel’s global network spanning 250,000 route kilometers across 50 countries and 5 continents, carrying 10 terabits/s international bandwidth lit capacity.

Airtel is offering its new bandwidth-on-demand service under two different pricing models -- fixed and the subscription. Chitakara said customers will be able to provision bandwidth whenever they need on an hourly, daily or monthly basis according to their unique business needs.

“The new service will enable customers to manage their unpredictable bandwidth requirements to accelerate the adoption of newer technologies and move faster in their cloud and digital journey,” he said.