Bharti, Google and others in SME talks

Telco plans ATG to tap B2B & B2C segments

BANGALORE: Bharti Airtel, India’s largest integrated telecom company, is in talks with IT majors such as Oracle, Google, Microsoft, SAP and Wipro to drive IT adoption, particularly among small and medium businesses (SMEs).

The new drive will be implemented through a new Applications Technology Group (ATG), which will have two divisions - business-to- business (B2B) and business-to-consumer.

Jai Menon, director (customer service and IT) and group CIO, Bharti Enterprises, said the ATG would focus on bringing a basket of applications to all three segments — consumers, SMBs and large enterprises —across three platforms — mobile, personal computers and television. “Enterprise services and SMEs are huge opportunities for us. Software vendors and system integrators are also eyeing this space. We score over them in reach and distribution and the ability to provide care, which is a winning combination,” Menon told DNA Money.

The B2B division will focus on both large enterprises and SMEs by offering scaleable services that will leverage basic infrastructure for running IT applications. Video conferencing, hosted contact centres, managed storage, managed security and domain name services (DNS) are some of the other offerings.

Bharti Airtel plans to tap the SME market with affordable products under a one-stop shop model for addressing IT and connectivity needs.

Harit Shah, an analyst with Angel Broking, said that SMEs, given their smaller size and relatively limited financial resources, would opt for a ‘pay-per-use’ model, also known as software as a service (SaaS). “Such a model involves lower upfront payments and charges the user according to actual usage, rather than involving high upfront capex costs. Thus, SMEs are more likely to go for such models, which will help them balance their costs and revenues,” he said.

Bharti Airtel plans to enter the market through Airtel Enterprise Services (AES), channel partners and SME customers. It is also India’s first telecom company to be accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a US-based non-profit body that authorised it to act as a registrar in one or more top-level domains.

The B2C division will deliver applications to the mass markets (urban, semi-urban and rural). It will co-operate closely with application developers by launching an application developer community. By allowing developers into the market through service delivery platforms (SDPs), it will reduce time to market by 25%.

“There is a paradigm shift from the ‘capital IT’ to ‘little IT’. For me, ‘little IT’ is the information tone. Applications in the B2C ATG will be delivered in a scaleable and pervasive manner, much like an information tone, similar to the dial tone, being available to all. This will trigger a wave of transformation in the telecom space. We are gearing ourselves to simplicity. This doesn’t mean we are sub-optimising on technology. We want to offer SME customers seamless experience and benchmark security practices for their benefit,” said Menon.