Telecom Lead India: Bharti Airtel is taking several
innovative steps to prepare its enterprise business division to compete with
mobile majors such as Verizon, AT&T, BT, Telefonica, Orange, etc.
Telecom operators such as Verizon Wireless, AT&T, BT,
Orange and Telefonica have exclusive labs and development teams to bring out
new products.
Airtel will strengthen its development center for
enterprise business where developers will get more opportunities for
innovation.
This is already available through our MATE platform
where the ISV gets an opportunity to integrate their software and
customization,” said Najib Khan, CMO – airtel business, Bharti Airtel.
Innovation in business offerings is important for Airtel
as it is facing challenges to increase revenue from mobile voice
business.
Preparing Airtel for bagging orders from global
enterprises is vital for the mobile major.
Recently, Economic Times reported that AT&T is working on new
consumer products that seek to empower users. These include technologies that
will help people find things they tend to forget (like office keys when leaving
home) and some others like haptics (working with touch) steering wheel will
make driving easy and less distracting.
Airtel’s plans for building connected vehicle concept in India are in the early
stages. India’s number one mobile service provider is currently in talks with
automobile majors in the country to assist vehicle firms to launch connected
vehicles in the country.
Airtel is also planning to leverage tablet boom in India.
The telecom service provider has recently tied up with a major financial
institution to offer thousands of tablets to its sales force.
Our whitelisting of URLs solution with tablets, video
conferencing on tablet solutions etc are some of the initiatives to bring more
productivity via tablets to Indian enterprises,” Khan added.
Usage of tablets among global enterprises is growing
rapidly. Recently, Samsung said the University of Southern Mississippi is piloting up to 1,000 Galaxy
Tab 10.1 devices to be distributed to selected Honors College, McNair Scholars,
Southern Style and Gulf Coast students. The goal of this mobile initiative is
to provide students with privately funded tablets focused on enhancing access
to education.
Airtel’s also increasing its presence in the smart grid business. Bharti Airtel
has a solution to offer smart metering and is already deploying SIMs under the
APDRP project.
Video services on mobile phone are a big business for
global telecom operators. Bharti Airtel will explore business opportunities by
offering video conferencing services on mobile phones in association with Polycom.
airtel business has a customer base of 450 carriers
and service providers around the world along with the top 2000 Indian and MNC
enterprises. Its data center & managed services include entire suite of
managed hosting, storage, business continuity, data security & cloud services.
airtel business has 10 percent increase in revenue to Rs 1120 crore in fourth
quarter fiscal 2011-12 from Rs 1022 crore in the same quarter previous
year. The enterprise business division spent Rs 34 crore during the fourth
quarter as Capex against Rs 45 crore in Q4 fiscal 2010-11.
