Airtel Business, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, is India’s largest enterprise connectivity provider, with over a million customers across the country. Ranked as the nation’s largest B2B company, Airtel Business is rapidly expanding and has grown to become a key player in the enterprise cloud services market, having recently been awarded the Cloud and CDN Mandate from Digital India Corporation to power DIKSHA, India’s national platform for open education digital content.
Tara Neal, Executive Editor at The Fast Mode spoke to Vani Venkatesh, CEO, Global Business at Airtel Business. Vani explores the demand for advanced cloud solutions, how operators are uniquely positioned to deliver these solutions, and why cloud is driving the overall market for B2B services. Vani also discusses Airtel’s CDN solutions and some of their recent deployments.
Tara: How are rich, low-latency applications such as video streaming and gaming pushing the need for advanced cloud solutions across enterprises?
Vani: The explosion of content and demand for HD & UHD quality content coupled with rapid increase in the consumption of OTT services has been a catalyst for cloud solutions. Organizations need advanced technology solutions to ensure superior user experience of their platform and to rapidly scale their user reach.
In addition to this, applications today demand low latency and high bandwidth network solutions for cutting-edge use cases like AR/VR content or interactive events like live streaming of sports or interactive Ed-Tech. Similarly, live multiplayer gaming need high compute & Bandwidth with better access to gaming servers (Distribution).
All of these have together given rise to the need for solutions that go beyond traditional Infra-As-A-Service offerings and combine the strengths of high-end compute and a distributed network to enable these applications to deliver value.
Tara: Can you share more about Airtel CDN solutions and how it benefits today’s networks and applications?
Vani: Airtel CDN has 100+ nodes across 15 distinct locations across India that enable efficient delivery of services that demand high-speed content delivery like 4K streams.
Airtel Edge cloud compute plays a significant role offering a pay per use model to deliver true value across our 120+edge Datacenters in India
Airtel, through its superior network and capacity is best suited to deliver a complete content delivery stack to a variety of devices and OEMs which serve a vast populous of heavy data users.
Tara: What are the factors that position operators as the preferred partner for managed cloud services?
Vani: Operators like us, adopted cloud several years ago, and operate and maintain workloads at a scale which is bigger than what many enterprises have deployed today. Our expertise and skills are therefore unmatched and cut across technologies, cloud platforms and OEMs to serve the end customers. Our high service rate given our resilient network and data center back up ensure 30% latency reduction along with wide reach for 99.99% service availability. This ability, coupled with the legacy assets like data centers and connectivity makes Airtel a partner of choice for large enterprises for managed services.
When a connectivity network is leveraged on a data center to deliver cloud to customers, large operators like us, become a part of the cloud journey for most customers, directly or indirectly, either by providing the connectivity to the cloud or by being the colocation partner for the hyperscaler.
Tara: Why are operators' cloud capabilities important in driving B2B business, referring to how Airtel Cloud is catalyzing the growth of Airtel Business?
Vani: Cloud services are a key element of end-to-end connectivity solutions that are key for B2B offerings. Each technology – cloud, data center, IoT/M2M, are all intertwined with core connectivity solutions. Cloud capabilities when coupled with the other connectivity solutions are therefore the best integrated proposition in the market across multiple domains ranging from consumer technology, retail, banking and information technology amongst others, and are therefore imperative for the growth of the business segment.
Tara: What are some of Airtel Cloud’s recent deployments?
Vani: Partnering the Ministry of Education for its digital education platform - DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) and transforming digital education in India by making 9300+ courses easily accessible to teachers and students across 28 states and 8 Union Territories in the country. Airtel’s cloud capability will enable Diksha to scale and widen its content offerings exhaustively. Students can enjoy a fantastic experience of Diksha across mobile application and website with zero buffering or loading delays on any education content across 35+ Indian languages. Airtel will enable the Govt’s roadmap of completely digitizing the distribution of content (text books / learning modules) for rural India
Partner to the Government of Rajasthan for building a private cloud set up on the Oracle Exadata platform along with Oracle licenses. They needed a solution partner who could help deploy the entire private cloud set up on their premises.
A leading, large global OTT platform has collaborated with us so that they can leverage our solutions to scale their distribution with better capacity, allowing more concurrent users and drastically improved end user experience.
Vani Venkatesh is the CEO for the Global Business arm of Bharti Airtel and is responsible for driving the brand’s B2B strategy in the global markets. Prior to this, Vani was heading the Delhi/NCR circle for the brand. She has also led the Marketing and Retail teams at Airtel. She joined Airtel from Abbott Healthcare (India) where she was responsible for the medical nutrition business. In her vast experience spanning 25+ years, Vani has also worked with other leading brands like McKinsey & Company and Hindustan Unilever. With an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, Vani is also a qualified CA, Cost & Works Accountant and Company Secretary.
