Airtel, AWS driving digital transformation for businesses in India

Airtel and AWS have announced a strategic collaboration to offer an innovative suite of cloud solutions to drive the digital transformation of businesses in India.

Puneet Chandok, President, Commercial Business, India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd, asked: "What is the customer looking for? Right cloud strategy! What is the right cloud strategy that ensures agility and scalability. There is a need to set and achieve the right TCO goals. There is a need to build cloud-native apps and to mitigate the legacy apps. Customers are asking these questions of us. We need to build the right business scale and implementation plan. We need trusted partners to do this. We are looking for partners who can do hand-holding."

Public cloud services in India are likely to reach $7.1 billion in 2024, at a CAGR of 20.3% from $3.4 billion in 2020, as per IDC. By 2021, 50% of the enterprises in India will rely on a mix of on-prem, dedicated private clouds, public clouds, and legacy platforms. By 2024, 40% of large enterprises in India will rely on third-party SPs for help with containers, open source and cloud-native apps development. By 2024, there will be an explosion of data driven by demand for AI-enabled automation, IoT and smart devices. By 2025, 10% of the Indian enterprises on-premise workload will be supported by public cloud.

AWS brings lot more functions to the table. We can support any workload. We have thousands of active customers in India. We have professional expertise in security. We are innovating the fastest, especially in analytics and IoT.

Ms. Harmeen Mehta, CIO and Head, Cloud and Security Business, Bharti Airtel, said: "We have announced a strategic collaboration to offer an innovative suite of cloud solutions to drive the digital transformation of businesses in India. Airtel connects over a million enterprises across the country. We have a trusted relationship with them. We have taken this to the data and cyber security businesses.

"Airtel is today India's largest integrated telecom company. We are in the business of providing infrastructure and services. We have a hybrid strategy, as well. We have industry-specific solutions. We serve all sorts of businesses. Our understanding of the various businesses is very deep. AWS and Airtel can co-create products. The depth that AWS also brings is very good. Together, we will provide a range of cloud services."

Airtel Cloud offerings, powered by AWS, are IoT, security services, app modernization, BCP-DR, workspaces, data analytics such as AI/ML, migrations and assessments, database freedom -- from commercial to open source database. Getting entire countries running from home has also tested us and our network. A lot of our customers' outlook has also changed towards BCP and DR. There are attacks on critical infrastructure. We are constantly upgrading. IoT is a growing phenomena. Manufacturing and medical are seeing more use cases. With the world moving to connected, this will only grow further.

Airtel is driving colocation models with hundreds of customers. A lot of them have been asking for help in making their operations get AI-lead. We can truly play an integral part in bringing digital transformation across India.