Cloud service provider Oracle announced its partnership with Bharti Airtel’s data centre unit in order to add more customers in India.
The partnership with Airtel Nxtra will help Oracle, which runs a cloud region in financial capital of Mumbai and another in the southern tech hub of Hyderabad, expand the capacity of its India West region, said Garrett Ilg, President, Oracle Japan and Asia Pacific.
For Oracle, the tie-up marks the opportunity to sell cloud services to Airtel’s more than a million India enterprise customers. It’s also a chance to tap tens of millions of small businesses looking to use digital services in a market where public cloud spending is expected to exceed $12 billion by 2025, according to tech researcher Gartner.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are the leading Cloud companies in India.
The arrangement also boosts Airtel’s data centre expansion drive – for which it has committed to invest more than $673 million- helping the company add new revenue streams and attract enterprise clients who typically offer higher margins, Reuters reported.
Airtel rival Reliance Jio forged an alliance with the US-based software giant Microsoft in 2019 to build data centres across India. This year Jio partnered with Google to boost its enterprise and consumer offerings as it plans to launch 5G services.
Oracle will hire thousands of employees annually over the next few years, highlighting the Austin, Texas-headquartered company’s focus on India.
Separately, Oracle also said it was opening a cloud region in Singapore which will help it offer enterprise cloud services in Southeast Asia, another key market for the U.S. company.
Oracle will also invest as much as $30,000 in the city state’s startups to help them enhance their cloud capabilities.
Oracle and Airtel will set up a Cloud Centre of Excellence in Gurgaon with a dedicated team of specialists from both organisations. These experts will help modernise Airtel’s internal workloads as well as enable customers to adopt cloud and fully benefit from it.
Airtel and Oracle will work on joint IP solution development to support emerging technology growth areas. These include multicloud solutions, B2B customer experience solutions, unified communications solutions among others.
Oracle will expand its India West (Mumbai) region capacity with Nxtra by Airtel. 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 (USD 760 million) by 2025 to expand capacity by 3X to over 400 MW.
The expanded Mumbai Region will complement Oracle’s existing MeitY-empanelled cloud regions in Hyderabad and Mumbai.
