The goal of the expanded deal is to bring a range of leading cloud solutions to more than 1 million enterprise customers, as the number of active Internet users in India is projected to grow from 622 million in 2020 to over 900 million by 2025.
Specifically, Oracle will partner with Nxtra by Airtel – the data centre subsidiary of Airtel, to expand its India West (Mumbai) region capacity which is due to become available in 2022.
At present, Nxtra by Airtel operates a network of 10 hyper data centres and 120 edge data centres and plans to invest approximately Rs. 5000 cr ($760 million) by 2025 as well as to expand its capacity by 3x to over 400MW.
The expanded Mumbai Region will complement Oracle’s existing MeitY-empanelled cloud regions in Hyderabad and Mumbai.
“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," said Garrett Ilg, president of Oracle Japan and Asia-Pacific.
"We want to help customers build true business continuity and disaster protection, while helping them address their in-country data residence requirements. Our partnership with Airtel is a milestone and together we can truly help Indian businesses fast-track growth and help boost India’s economy.”
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.
In addition, the two will also set up a Cloud Centre of Excellence in Gurgaon with a dedicated team of specialists from both organisations. Their role will be to modernise Airtel’s internal workloads as well as enable customers to adopt cloud and fully benefit from it. Airtel and Oracle will also work on joint IP solution development to support emerging technology growth areas.
"We are delighted to strengthen our close working relationship with Oracle even further. Airtel’s world-class data centre network will support Oracle’s cloud growth in India as they expand their cloud region in the country. Both companies will also partner to co-innovate cloud solutions for India’s digital economy and take these to the market by leveraging Airtel’s leadership in the enterprise segment," said Gopal Vittal, managing director & CEO, of Bharti Airtel - India and South Asia.
With its 5G ready network and large investments in digital infrastructure including data centres, Airtel is well positioned to tap the emerging growth opportunities in the enterprise segment as businesses accelerate their digital transformation journeys.”
