In Bharti Airtel and HP have entered into a five-year deal under which HP will provide cloud services to Airtel's large base of SMBs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
According to a report on EconomicTimes.com, "The telecom company has 30,000 SMB customers for internet and mobile services and now it will be able to expand that portfolio of services to include accounting software, storage, business software (like pay roll) or even additional computing resources."
The article quotes Airtel CIO Amrita Gangotra as saying that the telco will start the relationship with HP by first offering basic cloud services and later on expand to include more sophisticated services such as healthcare and education applications.
HP is understood to have a similar deal with the US telecom operator Verizon for that market. Here, it is arguably one of the first of its kind, though there have been several attempts by telcos to make deeper and deeper inroads into the enterprise market through services other than voice.
This and other such deals likely to be signed among providers of technology and connectivity could spell major changes for how businesses, especially SMBs a majority of which are still to deploy IT in a big way, build up their IT operations and strategy. This can also have implications for IT heads and managers working across various enterprises in terms of their career growth and prospects.
Add new comment