Bharti Airtel is now eyeing to tap into the growing business opportunity in the data centre segment with the support of OTT players in India
Telecom giant, Bharti Airtel is all set to provide support to global technology firms such as Microsoft and a few major application makers and become the largest data centre company in India. Nxtra Data Ltd, its data centre wing has planned to launch 10 new data centres and out of these, 4 are being planned for cities like Pune, Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata.
Eyeing data centre business
According to Ajay Chitkara, CEO, Airtel Business, over the top content, application services and cloud-based services providers will drive the growth of data centre business in India. “We signed with large global partnerships with all the big cloud companies. We are creating a marketplace for the cloud”, ET quoted the CEO. He added that Airtel’s infrastructure is being used by some of the major tech companies.
Chitkara further said that about 70 per cent of the data was stored outside India and for the purpose of storing, Airtel had decided to expand in the data centre market. India’s data localisation policy is also cited as one of the key drivers of this business.
Data centre ecosystem
The telecom major, with the help of its data centre wing, is in the process of creating an ecosystem for data centre business. Airtel is, reportedly, creating an internet exchange kind of a model that comprises data centre, submarine cable and wireless network. The company is also aiming to provide global content to the Indian audience with the help of OTT players and store it in a local data centre.
According to the CEO, Airtel is gaining from the data centre business with around adding 30-40% growth over the current customer base year-on-year. In India, the market comprising data centre infrastructure, public cloud services and private cloud services is estimated to reach $4-5 billion by 2020.
