Bharti Airtel and Cisco joined hands towards building a strategic business alliance for taping the Indian enterprise segment. The alliance will offer services such as managed data services, hosted unified communications, connected branch services as well as Cisco’s popular tele-presence solutions.

The alliance aims to leverage from Airtel’s position as a market leader and Cisco’s IP technologies. The two will appoint a dedicated team to develop and manage these services with Bharti Airtel’s, Sr VP Sanjay Mittal to lead the team and reporting to a Governing Board comprising representations from both the parties.

Commenting on the alliance, Manoj Kohli, CEO and Joint Managing Director, Bharti Airtel, said, “This alliance is another step towards Bharti Airtel’s vision to be the partner of choice for both large and medium enterprises, supporting the Indian B2B growth story. With this unique alliance, we will expand our market coverage in the rapidly growing managed services market and simplify the purchase process for our mutual customers by facilitating joint sales, partner planning and customer engagements. After achieving leadership in the B2C segments, we are pursuing leadership in the B2B segments assiduously.”

Wim Elfrink, Chief Globalisation Officer and Executive Vice President, Cisco Services, said, “We are thrilled to join hands with Bharti Airtel in an innovative model for managed service providers. Building on the government’s commitment to rapid broadband deployment, we will together create and deliver transformational services for large enterprise and small and medium-sized business customers. This collaborative relationship is built on the strategy that we do not simply give our customers what we have; instead we create what they need by developing new business models and services adapted to our customers’ diverse needs.”

With this development, Cisco’s reach within the Indian enterprise community stands significantly increased. Till now Tata Communications was the sole partner for Cisco in India particularly for the tele-presence solutions. The move also means video-conferencing major, Polycom losing its exclusivity with Airtel as the only tele-presence partner.