Airtel is almost becoming a demigod – they have the leading market share and is moving from being a pure play telecom operator to an entity, which is at the center of ecosystem and can potentially drive innovation/businesses.
Airtel plans to offer SaaS to SMBs and is in talks with Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Google and Jamcracker to offer different applications on a pay-per-use or software-as-a-service (SaaS) model [source]
Airtel’s SaaS story
- Google And Airtel have partnered to enable Google Apps for Airtel’s broadband customers.
- Microsoft and Airtel, in partnership offers hosted messaging and collaboration solutions to SMBs.
The Mantra
‘Leveraging its countrywide infrastructure of backbone network and data centres, Bharti aims to play the role of “CIO in the cloud” for the SMBs.’
These surely are winds of change; and one SaaS player that I expect to kick-ass is Zoho – suprisingly, they haven’t yet focused on the Indian market (and is letting Google bag all the partnerships) – there is big money lying on the table and SaaS is surely becoming an interesting play.
There is nothing like Telcos pushing the SaaS pipe to SMBs – it just increases awareness and adoption.
What’s your opinion?
Recommended Readings: Sunil Mittal on Entrepreneurship, Startup Life and Soccer
List of SaaS startups in India
If anything innovative/creative happens in india telcos, Sunil mittal will be a part of it ALWAYS. He likes transformation very much. just like from 15 Rs /min to 10paise/min to this step.
he has real passion for tech and biz
Ashish,
The reason Zoho is not in the picture is not hard to fathom… Telcos are signing up Google Apps primarily for one application – e-mail. Google Docs is far from being a credible alternative to Microsoft Office for real-world business use but Gmail can pretty much do everything that Outlook/Exchange does (and then some).
Zoho, on the other hand, has an anemic e-mail offering (in private beta for several years now) and is therefore not in the reckoning. Of course, their other Office apps are at best, marginally better than what Google offers and still have a long way to go before threatening Microsoft Office too.
Also, Zoho’s stand seems to be to offer office productivity apps for free and then upsell business apps (like CRM) which to my mind is a leap too far! I think this obfuscates the positioning/proposition that they offer to potential partners like telcos and make the sell more difficult.
I completely agree Mahesh … Sunil Mittal will always be a part of the change ..
TELCOS NEED HELP GETTING INTO VALUE ADDED BUSINESS APPS
If Bharti Airtel intends to offer SAAS products it would have to be more than an infrastructure provider. Even as an infrastructure provider all the telco’s can offer is wireless spectrum and landlines. If telcos want to provide any value and make money they need to get into design and development of SAAS apps. At the moment they can at most distribute simple apps like e-mail, search etc. Complex business apps like ERP, CRM etc. is a whole different ballgame.
Any telco that wants to get into the SAAS game or any other business value added solutions space, they need to work with the Salesforces and Oracles of the world. Great opportunity to use that Bharti Innovation fund!
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Agree with Mahesh – Airtel always seems to be at the forefront of telecom innovation. I recently wrote an article about its tie up with XIUS-bcgi to launch contact-less technology – which I believe will transform small value payments by turning your mobile phone into wallets. This innovation might also change the marketing landscape, and drive more people to browse the web through their mobile phone. Check out my post on the partnership here: http://www.moneyvidya.com/blog/?s=xius
Gautam Kshatriya
gautam.kshatriya@moneyvidya.com
http://www.moneyvidya.com/blog
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