The IT Perspective on Bharti Airtel’s Incredible Expansion

There was yet another need to integrate the systems and processes across circles, and initiate the swift migration of all heterogeneous processes to one platform across the 23 circles.

It took several months to set everything right. There was a strong belief that  the problem was not technology  but integration, and its alignment with business thereafter, which was essential to keep growth steady on the S-curve.

Data residing at multiple locations on multiple heterogeneous storage systems and subsystems had to be migrated to the new data model, which would be central and accessible to all in a uniform fashion. Based on the experience of multiple integration exercises, the company has since created a blue book - a Center of Excellence.

"It took time to create the first set of common standards, but once this was achieved, it was just an act of replication," Jai Menon, director (innovation) and group CIO of Bharti Airtel. In the IT model at Bharti Airtel, the base infrastructure layer primarily consists of WAN, LAN, network operating center and security layer. And so, another daunting integration task was knocking at the doors of the company: the outer physical layer of the network - the WAN. Every circle was operating on a separate WAN. Integrating the WANs onto one common protocol became necessary. Still, a heterogeneous WAN network wouldn't have allowed diverse traffic types to travel effectively on the common infrastructure. Towards this end, it became important to enable traffic engineering, where carriers direct traffic along predetermined paths. It was to make it easier to manage network build-outs and support customers.

As a result of the efforts to integrate, the first phase saw intrastrategic business unit (SBU) integration. Within all three divisions - mobility, fixed line and broadband businesses - the internal information systems were migrated onto one platform.

On the business side (customer facing applicationand IT systems), the company is slowly inching towards totally integrated and standardized platforms. The thrust is to first achieve integration of systems, business intelligence systems, data warehousing, so that there is one national picture to view.

The entire IT infrastructure of Bharti Airtel now runs  on multi-protocol label switching WAN, which helps the company support a host of applications, including the ones that are leading-edge.  Migrating to MPLS-based services also cut costs for the company depending on the degree of converged traffic that Bharti Airtel was running on it. For business and internal IT, IBM became the key outsourcing partner with 15 more providers lined up behind it. For all contact center technology, Bharti Airtel picked Nortel and seven of its associated partners. On the infrastructure front, IBM was again the strategic outsourcing partner, with some others. All partners work on a revenue sharing basis, so that there is no immediate capital expenditure.

"We are targeting at mobility, fixed line and broadband - will have one content gateway, one messaging gateway and one application gateway across all platforms, that is, PC, mobile and TV-- by 2008.That will make us a 100 percent integrated telecom carrier. We'll be the first telecom company in the world to achieve this," claims Menon.

The Person Behind It

Jai Menon

director (innovation) and group CIO, Bharti Airtel

Legacy has to be a setting sun in the cases of bigger alignments and M&As. Otherwise, the situation remains the same.