Bharti Airtel Ltd. and Amazon Web Services, the cloud services unit of retail company Amazon, will team up to develop the India telecom company's cloud business and allow it to many products, the two companies said Wednesday.
Bharti Airtel is the third-biggest telecom operator in India with more than 300 million subscribers.
Amazon Internet Services India and South Asia president Puneet Chandok said the depth and breadth of Amazon Web Services and the far reach and expertise of Airtel meant the two could create differentiated cloud products.
The partnership can help Amazon Web Services boost its position in India. A similar agreement was made by Reliance Jio and Microsoft Corp. in 2019 for a 10-year venture.
Airtel-Amazon Web Services will compete with the Reliance Jio-Microsoft alliance for a share of the growing public cloud market in India. Reliance Jio Infocomm is India's biggest telecom operator. It has secured more than $20 billion in recent months from Facebook, Google and other investors.
According to Boston Consulting Group, India's public cloud market is one of the biggest in Asia-Pacific next only to Australia and Japan. By 2023, the consulting group expects the India public cloud market will reach $8 billion from $2.6 billion in 2018.
Based on data from the IDC Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker Forecast 2019, the public cloud services market in India is expected to be worth $7.1 billion by 2024, accelerating at a compounded annual growth rate of 20.3 percent from $3.4 billion in 2020.
Airtel serves more than 2,500 large groups and more than 1 million emerging businesses and companies. It sealed a similar cloud contract with Google in January. That alliance remains.
