Airtel would target small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in smaller cities to achieve three-fold growth in data and IP services.
The company targets 120% growth in the data and IP vertical, said Sanjay Bhutani, vice-president, corporate business, Bharti Airtel Ltd.
?There are 5 million potential SMEs that could be tapped to offer our range of telecom products. We follow the service integrator model. There are about 100 service integrators in states like Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, implementing Airtel’s telecom solutions at the client-end. We will be ramping up the SIs from 100 now to 250 by year end,? he said.
As there is convergence in telecom and IT in delivering business solutions to a client, Airtel has already embarked upon the process of certification by IT vendors, with the recent one being Cisco gold certification of Airtel.
The data business vertical could get a major thrust in the SME space with the rolling out of 3 G services. Bhutani said: ?As the wire line penetration is geographically limited, much of data business activities happen on desktops and laptops through plain vanilla high speed internet connection in a SME ecosystem. Other than wireline, the data services could be availed through Radio Frequency (RF) and VSAT distribution platforms with premium to the SME customers. The buzzword is 3 G and small screen computing. We strongly believe that small screen computing would unfold in a big way with the launch of 3G services by November or October.?
He said the company is adopting the OPEX, and not the CAPEX model, to address the cost issues facing SMEs.
“The Operational Expenditure(OPEX) model is best described as pay-as-you-grow model with no upfront capital expenditure. We are further mulling over setting up of a financial services division to open credit lines to our SME buyers to set up necessary telecom infrastructure”.
He said small businesses incur one-fourth of the cost of what enterprise and corporate customers pay towards setting up of telecom infrastructure. ?The decision making is made on two key parameters namely total Cost of ownership and return on investment. We believe that OPEX model address these twin issues,? he added.