Airtel partners with Cisco to offer advanced connectivity solutions

Airtel Business serves more than 500,000 medium and small businesses, 2,000 large businesses and 1,000 global enterprises.

Bharti Airtel, the global telecommunications services company headquartered in Gurgaon recently announced that it has partnered with Cisco Systems, the American technology conglomerate to offer advanced connectivity and networking solutions to small-and-medium and enterprise business customers in India.

In an official statement the telco has been reported to say that the partnership is meant to leverage Airtel’s network and customer relationships to offer cutting-edge and highly secure digitization technology from Cisco in India as businesses increasingly tap digitization for enhanced growth and agility.

According to sources close to the matter Bharti Airtel in collaboration with Cisco will be enabled to offer managed SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) services to its customers. The solution is planned to have a management controller and a centralized policy that will provide clear view of data flows across the network to customers and help them in data traffic optimization as par business needs.

Ajay Chitkara, CEO, Airtel Business was quoted saying that the alliance is meant to further strengthen the relationship between Airtel and Cisco. He added that digitalization of Indian has opened up a massive residual opportunity for businesses in achieving their digital transformation journey and attain the next level of growth.

Sameer Garde, President, Cisco India & SAARC was reported to say that Airtel is well positioned in India to offer enterprise customers with next-gen digitization solutions and meet the quality of service expectations.

For the record, Airtel Business serves more than 500,000 medium and small businesses, 2,000 large businesses and 1,000 global enterprises.

India’s second-largest telecom operator had also entered another agreement in February with Ciena, the U.S. based telecommunications networking equipment supplier with the aim to build a photonic control plane network in the country which will also be one of the largest in the world. The network is expected to provide super-fast broadband services over 4G, 5G and FTTH architectures.

Bharti Airtel will also be offering the Cisco-Webex service for conferencing and collaboration needs.