Bharti: Taking Bharat by Storm

A supple IT infrastructure lends support for all new projects

Dr Jai Menon, Bharti

A crystal clear vision impeccably translated into action-that is the story
of Bharti. A measured planning has led Bharti on the technology road, which
began its journey in 2002 and is well etched out till 2007. The scale of the
current IT machinery includes over a thousand IBM, HP and Sun servers all over
Bharti, with the main data center being located in Delhi.

Bharti's factory model comprises four functions: Solutions Engagement which
makes IT deliverable to a project sponsor; Program Management Office to ensure
delivery on time; Application Development and Operations to keep the first three
running-all these sitting on top of Bharti's internal Strategy and
Architecture Roadmap. Solutions engagement has been kept in-house, while the
rest have been strategically outsourced to IBM.

In fact, Bharti has been a case study for IT infrastructure outsourcing in
India Inc. The landmark $750 mn IBM deal, which is based on a revenue-sharing
model, takes care of its every IT need. The comfort couch that comes with this
engagement is the fact that capex blips do not hinder the IT cost at Bharti.

All the 23 mobile circles have their own IT departments, with a central
Architecture Review Board (ARB) reviewing the performance circle. The IBM
WebSphere intranet allows for audio/video conferencing and chat as well as other
sparkles like e-learning, knowledge management and content management. Lotus is
Bharti's pick for email. The major applications supporting the systems are
Kenen Billing, Oracle CRM, Intec Interconnect and NCR TeraData for Business
intelligence and Data warehousing. The titanic telecom has a captive call center
for post-paid and fixed-line services, whereas, prepaid has been outsourced.
Bharti's disaster recovery facility is situated in Chennai.

For 2005, Bharti's three major initiatives are the logical next steps in
its IT journey. An enhanced IBM selective partner outsourcing, an IP-based
virtualized call center infrastructure across all locations using auto call
diversion and speech recognition and a Service Delivery Platform (SDP) for
content and application services to be delivered to the end customer over
mobile, fixed line and broadband.

A supple IT infrastructure, which continuously maps business requirements to
IT requirements, lends support to Bharti for all its new projects. With the GPRS
network already rolled out, the next would be the Edge network and further
exploration of 3G including DSL broadband and broadband wireless (Wi Max 802.16
& 802.20).