Indian multinational telecommunications services company Bharti Airtel and Cloud service provider Oracle announced new Cloud and data centre deals to help boost the digital economy and empower more than 1 million enterprise customers, as data consumption explodes in India amid rapid Internet and smartphone penetration.
The partnership with Airtel Nxtra will help Oracle expand the capacity of its India West region, said Garrett Ilg, President, Oracle Japan, and the Asia Pacific. The expanded Oracle Cloud Mumbai Region will be available in 2022.
Nxtra by Airtel operates India's largest data centre network of 10 hyper data centres and 120 edge data centres and plans to invest Rs 5,000 crore by 2025 to expand capacity by 3X to over 400 MW.
As part of the collaboration, Airtel Business and Oracle will also jointly market Oracle Cloud solutions to enterprise customers in the private and public sectors. Airtel Business serves over one million enterprises in India, including large corporations, start-ups, governments, and SMEs. Oracle Cloud solutions will now be available to these customers as part of Airtel Business’ integrated portfolio.
The number of active Internet users in India is projected to grow to over 900 million by 2025 from 622 million in 2020, driven by affordable smartphones and data tariffs. With 5G services expected to begin in 2022, the Indian economy will see a surge in demand for digital services and applications, Bharti Airtel said in a statement.
Additionally, organisations are moving to cloud-based applications to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. As a result, India’s public cloud market is expected to grow from USD 3.6 billion in 2020 to USD 9.5 billion by 2025.
“The demand for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is on the rise. We’ve witnessed triple-digit growth in the business last year with more and more organizations, of all sizes ranging from top banks and telcos to governments and unicorns, in Asia, turning to OCI to run their mission-critical workloads. We want to help customers build true business continuity and disaster protection while helping them address their in-country data residence requirements,” said Garrett. “Our partnership with Airtel is a milestone and together we can truly help Indian businesses fast-track growth and help boost India’s economy.”
