On Tuesday, Cisco and Bharti Airtel, Asia’s leading integrated telecom service provider, announced the formation of a strategic business alliance to help drive growth for Indian enterprises. The alliance will combine the strengths of Airtel’s network service provider leadership and Cisco’s Internet Protocol (IP) 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 TelePresenceTM.
The companies will appoint a dedicated team to develop and manage these services to fulfill the requirements of customers across small, medium and large enterprises. Sanjay Mittal, senior vice president of Bharti Airtel, will lead the initiative with the support of a Governing Board comprising executives from both companies.
“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, ” said Bharti Airtel CEO and joint managing director Manoj Kohli. “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.”
“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, ” said Cisco chief globalisation officer and executive vice president Wim Elfrink. “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.”
