Bharti Televentures goes ‘On Demand’ with IBM

In a landmark announcement, Bharti Televentures, India’s largest mobile and leading basic telephony conglomerate has inked a deal with IBM India to outsource all its IT needs to the latter, giving a big push to attempts by Big Blue to establish itself as a major IT outsourcing player in India. The deal, in some sense, also gave a major boost to IBM’s ‘On Demand’ computing initiative.

Bharti will outsource its pan-India IT infrastructure, including maintenance, to IBM. This decision came after a 15-month long deliberation involving top officials in both Bharti and IBM. Calling it a unique deal, IBM officials were projecting it as nothing short of a model for other telecom and large enterprises to follow.

By winning this deal IBM will be the custodian of all of Bharti’s IT infrastructure, be it CRM, billing, interconnect or business intelligence. This will also cover IT in HR, financials, Intranet, e-mail, e-learning and other collaboration aspects of the company. IBM, through this deal, will procure, deploy, maintain and upgrade all of Bharti’s infrastructure, which will also include areas such as security, data centres, disaster recovery and procurement of PCs, servers, storage, etc.

In turn, Bharti will be the preferred supplier for IBM’s growing telecom needs in India. It will provide a range of solutions to IBM, including bandwidth, satellite links, last mile connectivity, wireless/wired solutions and also the national and international long distance services.

The size of the deal is gigantic. For the first five years it is expected to be $250-275 million and over a 10-year period it could grow to $750 million.

Bharti will be serviced through an onsite presence of 200 IBM employees at different locations; Bharti’s IT staff will become IBM India employees.

When asked why Bharti chose a foreign outsourcing partner for its IT outsourcing needs, Sunil Mittal, CMD, Bharti Enterprises said, “In the global economy, the concept of national or foreign is minimal. What matters most is how well a company can provide solutions. IBM, to me, is the best IT company with the most comprehensive suite of solutions as on date.”

IBM will deploy an open standards-based framework, and a service provider delivery environment (SDPE), allowing Bharti Televentures the flexibility to introduce the latest data, voice and content-based services.