Airtel Business plans to woo startups to digital platform

Bharti Airtel’s enterprise arm Airtel Business is eyeing a larger share in emerging enterprises, including small and medium businesses (SMBs) and startups through its new digital platform, which is offering internet plans without any data caps.

“Emerging enterprises are key growth drivers for the company as well as for the economy,” Airtel Business CEO Ashok Ganapathy said. Airtel Business’ new digital platform, which allows emerging businesses to buy connectivity plans through unlimited leased lines connections, plans to offer new communication and collaboration products that will enable faster time to market for these emerging businesses and enhance ease of doing business.

The platform eliminates multiple layers of traditional processes and allows businesses to identify and buy connectivity solutions, effectively bringing down the total time required to order and deploy a solution up to 70%, the company said.

“We see immense opportunity in serving the vast SMB segment as businesses embrace digital technologies to drive growth. We also have a strong presence in central and state government departments and divisions,” Ganapathy said.

“Our vast network and integrated portfolio backed by experience in serving enterprises provides us with a robust platform to leverage this emerging opportunity,” he added.

It also offers cash management solutions through Airtel Payments Bank to its business-to-business customers.

With growing digitisation, Ganapathy said, emerging businesses are looking at connectivity solutions that are available and activated in quick time, and are highly reliable and scalable as per their requirements.

He said Airtel serves more than 2,000 large enterprise accounts and about five lakh SMB customers, including 70-80% tech startups in India.