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Our Bureau

Bangalore, Oct. 6 Bharti Airtel Ltd and Cisco announced a strategic business alliance on Tuesday to create products and services for Indian corporates.

The alliance will leverage the strengths of Airtel’s network and Cisco’s Internet Protocol (IP) technologies to create and sell products and services such as managed data services, hosted unified communications, connected branch services and Cisco TelePresence.

Both companies will appoint a dedicated team led by Mr Sanjay Mittal, Senior Vice-President at Bharti Airtel, to develop and manage these services to cater to customers across SMBs and large enterprises. “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,” said Mr Manoj Kohli, CEO and Managing Director of Bharti Airtel.

“From the business-to-consumer (B2C) market, we are shifting focus to business-to-business (B2B) market comprising large and medium enterprises and over 6 million small and medium enterprises. The timing of the pact is important as the Indian economy is on the threshold of a major B2B growth,” Mr Kohli said. Neither vendor, however, disclosed the revenue-sharing model.

Mr Wim Elfrink, Chief Globalisation Officer, Cisco Services, said, “Building on the Indian government’s commitment to rapid broadband deployment over the next five years, we will together create and deliver transformational services for large enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses.”

Commenting on the alliance, Mr Nareshchandra Singh, Principal Research analyst at Gartner, said it could work well for Bharti Airtel, which lacked a solution kind of offering. As customers prefer to buy solutions rather than just products, the alliance could work well.

More Stories on : Alliances & Joint Ventures | Telecommunications | Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd

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