Bharti Airtel, the leading telecommunications provider, announced on Tuesday its partnership with Microsoft India to offer cloud computing services to small and medium business enterprises (SMBs).
According to MediaNama, Airtel plans to bundle Microsoft 365 suite with its DSL and Internet Leased Lines for business. The price of the packages is not disclosed on its website, but it appears that there are specific plans targeted at freelancers as well as small business owners.There is no information on the Airtel website in relation to this tie-up.
Sanjay Kapoor, CEO, India & South Asia, Bharti Airtel, stated, “We are delighted to partner with Microsoft to address the growing ICT needs of the SMB segment. The partnership will allow us to become a virtual CIO for our SMB customers, According to industry estimates there is a growing affinity towards technology adoption in this segment and their IT spending is surging at a rate of 15 percent per year. SMB segment has shown a high adoption of Cloud computing especially SaaS – which contributes more than 50 percent to the overall cloud market. With our superior network experience and Microsoft’s dependable technology suite we will be able to offer cost effective and secure cloud services in a high growth SaaS market.”
Under this agreement, customers will be able create a public facing website with a domain name, access the latest releases from Office 365, anti-virus solutions and access to documents and emails anywhere.
Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India, stated, “We are pleased that Bharti Airtel will offer our world-class cloud productivity solution to SMBs in India, Agility, focus and cost are the key reasons why businesses are moving to a cloud and hence Microsoft’s partnership will allow Bharti Airtel’s customers to continue to stay ahead of the curve through solutions that truly fit their needs. The agreement will enable SMBs to take advantage of a secure cloud computing environment at an opex model based pricing.”
There is also no information on how the partnership works i.e. does Bharti Airtel sell this service to SMBs and pay Microsoft for every license used or whether there is any set revenue share agreement between the both companies?
