Airtel Cloud Adds 11 New Customers, Eyes Expansion

Bharti Airtel’s cloud business had 33 customers at the end of the June quarter after adding 11 new customers during the period, as the telecom operator continued to invest in scaling the business . The company said the platform has received certifications from MeitY, among others, to strengthen its go-to-market proposition. “We believe this business needs four things to really succeed – the right talent, capital that we have already invested, the go to market capabilities that we have, and the right solutions for continuing to build out what customers need. We are stepping up significant investments to continue to invest behind this to scale this,” executive vice-chairman Gopal Vittal said. On a recent earnings call, the telco’s management said that Airtel Cloud’s defining proposition is its sovereign-by-design architecture, with data, infrastructure and control-plane operations hosted, managed and governed entirely in India. Hosted on Airtel’s next-generation data centres and powered by its network, the platform offers infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), advanced connectivity and GenAI-based provisioning. It was engineered to support workloads of up to 140 crore transactions per minute for Airtel’s own operations before being extended to Indian businesses last year. Cloud is part of Airtel Business’ digital services portfolio, which also includes cybersecurity, IoT, CPaaS and digital platforms. Airtel Business reported revenue of about Rs 5,665 crore in the June quarter, while Airtel India’s revenue stood at Rs 41,214 crore. Sharing lessons from Airtel Cloud’s rollout, Vittal said enterprise decision-making cycles were longer because customers were moving workloads from on-premise infrastructure , hyperscaler clouds or private colocated clouds, making integration efforts significant. He also said high egress costs for customers already on another cloud platform could become a barrier. Vittal said Airtel was continuing to build its commercialisation capabilities and was seeing traction through simpler offerings such as disaster recovery, backup as a service, storage as a service and video surveillance as a service. He added that larger deals were emerging around sovereign cloud deployments for regulated sectors and public sector enterprises. Airtel is also building a dedicated cloud talent team while continuing to leverage its B2B go-to-market teams for technical sales and solution architecting.