Bharti gets enterprising, targets banks, IT firms

MUMBAI: After playing a key role in changing India’s telecom landscape with mobile services, Bharti Airtel is now strengthening and expanding its enterprise services business. The enterprise services division, made a separate business unit in March this year, is focusing on seven key verticals as it begins to cash in on the telecommunication needs of large enterprises, including banks, BPOs and financial services.

Enterprise services, which includes long distance and corporate enterprise businesses, mopped up Rs 900 crore in revenues in the quarter ended June 30, ’06. “As we move forward, we are accelerating. India is making big strides in automation, which has also been enabled by state-run projects. We see a plethora of opportunities for connecting enterprises,” Vinod Sawhny, joint president, Airtel Enterprise Services, told ET.

The unit’s other verticals are real estate, insurance, retail, IT and ITeS. Bullish on the banking vertical, Airtel has networked over 1,000 branches of Bank of India (BoI) in a contract valued at nearly Rs 64 crore.

This will help BoI in implementing the Basel II system, for which banks have to maintain data of every transaction at a centralised level. “We also provided them real-time gross settlement (RTGS) solution through which even outstation cheques are immediately settled,” said Mr Sawhny.

“Going forward, we will connect not only Indian branches of banks, but also their international branches. The next two to three years will see every bank well connected,” he added. The company will use its undersea cable infrastructure for international connectivity. Airtel’s i2i undersea cable network is complemented with the SeMeWe4 cable, which connects four subcontinents.

The margins in Bharti’s enterprise business jumped from 35.6% in January-March ‘06 to 47.5% in the first quarter of the current fiscal. It compares favourably with rivals in the enterprise segment, which include BSNL and Reliance Communications.