Bharti Airtel, Cisco team to drive India enterprise growth

Bharti Airtel and Cisco have formed a strategic business alliance to help drive growth for India enterprises. The alliance will combine the strengths of Airtel's network services provider leadership and Cisco's Internet Protocol technologies and expertise to work together to create and sell in a phased manner a set of unique products and services—including managed data services, hosted unified communications, connected branch services and Cisco TelePresence.

Bharti Airtel and Cisco will appoint a dedicated team to develop and manage these services to fulfil the requirements of customers across small, medium and large enterprises. Sanjay Mittal, senior vice president from Bharti Airtel, will lead the initiative with the support of a Governing Board comprising executives from both companies.

Commenting on the alliance, Manoj Kohli, CEO and joint managing director, Bharti Airtel, said: "This alliance is another step towards Bharti Airtel's vision to be the partner of choice for both large and medium enterprises, supporting the Indian B2B growth story. With this unique alliance, we will expand our market coverage in the rapidly growing managed services market and simplify the purchase process for our mutual customers by facilitating joint sales, partner planning and customer engagements. After achieving leadership in the B2C segments, we are pursuing leadership in the B2B segments assiduously."

Wim Elfrink, chief globalisation officer and executive vice president, Cisco Services, said: "We are thrilled to join hands with Bharti Airtel in an innovative model for managed service providers. Building on the government's commitment to rapid broadband deployment, we will together create and deliver transformational services for large enterprise and small and medium-sized business customers. This collaborative relationship is built on the strategy that we do not simply give our customers what we have; instead we create what they need by developing new business models and services adapted to our customers' diverse needs."

The vision of the strategic business alliance is to combine the unique differentiation and capabilities of Bharti Airtel and Cisco. Bharti Airtel brings strengths of market leadership and product expertise in network connectivity for large enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), in addition to strong distribution and a network of systems integration partners. Cisco brings value through its IP-based capabilities, strengths in next-generation network solutions, and enterprise and SMB channels. The unique products and services offered by this alliance will incorporate Cisco technology with the network Airtel network to target the burgeoning India managed services market.