Bharti Airtel extends managed service portfolio, enters into relationship with VMware

INDIA: Bharti Airtel, one of the leading emerging market’s telco today announced an extension of its Managed Services portfolio by entering into a strategic relationship with VMware.

Bharti Airtel’s Managed Virtual Compute services will help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for customers looking to transition to next-generation data center architectures. The initiative is set to provide a fillip to the Hosted IT services market in India.

This collaboration aims to target the enormous market potential for cloud-based managed compute services in India by offering external IT infrastructure for customers, allowing them to increase or reduce compute capacity based on ever changing business demands.

Bharti Airtel will offer these cloud services based on the VMware vSphere platform. Bharti Airtel also announced it is joining the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP). Bharti Airtel’s Managed Virtual Compute services will ride on its existing network infrastructure across the country and be available to Enterprise customers on a ‘pay per use’ model. Services would include Web Services, File, Mail, Database, Transaction, Disaster Recovery, Co-location and other Managed Services.

Rajan Swaroop executive director - enterprise services, Bharti Airtel said: “Bharti Airtel recognizes the need of its customers in the virtualization space and is happy to be collaborating with VMware in offering cloud based services for our customers. This being a first-of-its kind initiative in India, brings together strengths of Bharti Airtel’s managed services capabilities and highly reputed virtualization technologies from VMware. This initiative is reiteration of our commitment to constantly innovate and offer customized solutions through collaboration with industry leaders.”

T. Srinivasan, managing director, VMware India & SAARC said: “We’re excited about this strategic relationship with Bharti Airtel as it further validates the value proposition for customers and partners to use cloud computing services based on the VMware platform. This collaboration of technology visionaries will help accelerate the proliferation of innovative cloud services and solutions in India.”

For the end user, Managed Virtual Compute will act as a cost optimization tool. It would reduce the number of servers and related expense on space, power, operating system & management etc. The services will allow better management of IT capacity, optimize the resource allocation, will improve security and manageability of enterprise application and faster provision of new servers.