 Welcome back to JSA TV live the newsroom for tech telecom and data center professionals Buffy Harakitas, and we are coming to you live from PTC 23, and it is the biggest PTC Conference to date We're here live at the PTC hub right here in sunny Honolulu, Hawaii and joining me today is Vani of Venkatesh She is the CEO of global business for Airtel Vani, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you Yeah, it's such an honor and a privilege to be speaking with you today one of the few Women CEOs in our industry. So I am so honored to be sitting next to you and speaking to you Here at PTC. So what are you thinking of the conference so far? It's been amazing. Firstly. Thank you for the kind words It's it's an equal honor at the side. So it's been amazing for me. It's my first PTC So it's been particularly special and it's amazing the number of people we are meeting and the kind of Conversations we are having the trends that we are discern uncovering, right? It's been quite quite a fascinating experience so far. Well, I'm glad that you're having a great show We are too and as I mentioned earlier, it is the biggest PTC annual conference to date so welcome You know and many viewers, I'm sure I've already heard about Airtel But in case they didn't can you tell viewers a little bit more about our Airtel and what makes it so unique? Yeah, sure So we are a company which started off in India. We now have operations in India Africa and global operations in many countries and I think what makes us particularly unique is we have eyeballs of 450 million customers That's a lot of the population of the world so we have about 350 million eyeballs in India and another hundred million in Africa and We have tons of fiber. We have about 365,000 root kilometers of fiber across these countries. We present in about 50 countries across five continents So I think all in all we end up being a trusted connectivity partner for several corporates as well as consumers Thanks for sharing that information and you had so many big announcements at the end of 2022 What are you most excited to share? Yeah, lots of big announcements I think the two things that stand out for us is one is our investment into Africa along with yeah, so Meta is an anchor partner there and we are Co-investing in that cable to bring it into India. So we believe that will power the digital ecosystem in the country we have a landing station getting ready as we speak in Mumbai and We're putting more dedicated capacity to get that growing the second one is In no particular order is a launch of 5g in India. So we launched it last October We were the first to launch in the country and we again believe that that will revolutionize the way our Corporates as well as our Consumers use technology and use networks. So those are two things we are very excited about We're even more excited about what's coming in 2023, but more on that later. Oh, yeah We'll have to keep that on the wraps for now, but excited to Hear all about what you have coming up in in 2023 We know you also had some big data center related news With next year by air tail It's a subsidiary of air tail. Why don't you give us a little bit more information there? Yeah, absolutely And so next row was a initially was a wholly owned subsidiary. We now have investment from Carlisle. It's a yeah It's a big space and we're getting a fair amount of expertise as well there So we're very very proud of next right. We already have about 12 core data centers and 120 edge data centers in next row and The beauty of it is we are actually investing another six hundred million dollars over half a billion dollars over the next couple of years And we are scaling up into hyperscaler parks in about seven metros. So as we speak There are data centers getting ready in Mumbai in Kolkata in Pune in Chennai right in many locations which will not only serve India But it would also serve sake and we hope to be the data center hub of Asia with all the skills that we bring Congratulations on all of that news and your investment from Carlisle So shout out to the Carlisle group. They are also friends of ours Sustainability is such a hot critical important topic in our industry You know across all industries, of course So why don't you give us a little bit more? Information about what air tail next row by air tail is doing to be more sustainable. Yeah, so that's a topic We are very passionate about very very very close to our heart. We are too. Yeah Yeah, so Firstly we want to get net positive by 2030. We are already at the 40 45 percent range on that one Yeah, and some of our newer data centers are actually as good as 92 percent net positive And now we were tied up with a bunch of Bunch of like-minded corporates so including with bloom for renewable energy solutions. Yeah. Yeah for renewable energy solutions. We're investing a lot in Liquid fuel cooling technology in a hydrogen based cell cooling technology. So We are quite passionate about sustainability and we are hoping to contribute our bit to the environment that we live in That's wonderful. And of course as you know JSA is also very passionate about Sustainability with our greener data movement. I'm sure you see it everywhere. We just launched our greener data directory yesterday We're also partners with bloom energy. Oh, that's lovely. Yes. So great to hear in fact I think we have them coming up soon later. So great to hear that No, all of the key players are joining Forces, you know to really make the world a more sustainable place for our future Okay, so switching gears a little bit. I mean infrastructure, you know is essential to the success of a lot of new age companies OTTs gaming, you know, we have been tech going a little or not a little bit more You know more towards the digital side How is air-to-hell providing support to all of these new age organizations? Yeah, I think that's a brilliant question So I think we have two skills that we bring to the table So one is we're very very strong on infrastructure and the other is we've also Invested very heavily on digital and cloud-based ecosystems to power the kind of companies you're talking about So in the infrastructure like I mentioned, we have huge fiber coverage both in India in Africa And we have partnerships with many many countries We have our data center, right? We do a lot of national long-distance as well as local access We've invested in subsea so we have about Some kind of ownership in seven cables and participation in about 33 cables So we are well spread across in terms of connecting anyone from anywhere to anywhere What we've done is we've layered on top of that a fair amount of Digital ecosystem and just to give you three examples on how we are leveraging the cloud in the digital ecosystem for OTT is the new age companies as well as our incumbent companies which are going the digital way So there's one product for example, which is called a tail IQ. It's the first Network embedded cloud-based technology for C pass So what we end up doing is we end up enabling communication through different channels be it voice be it messaging be it video channels to transform the customer experience for Communication for corporate. So that's just one example. We also have our own et al. Clouds at CDN So we leverage that to provide Great experience in terms of web and video content delivery to our customers. So again, it's a great use case and in Gaming and healthcare and ed tech right for OTT. So it's a it's a great use case The third of course as I mentioned is 5g and we believe that that will revolutionize the way We look at the cyber security. We look at IOT or the way we even deliver services on our edge So within the combination of the infrastructure strength We have the eyeballs that we have And the data center investments that you're doing and the digital ecosystem Will really put us in a big place to be the trusted partner for a lot of these companies Well, definitely sounds like it. Yeah, 100% so congratulations Thank you on all of that and all the innovations that you're working on, you know from 5g to Cloud platforms to you know enabling C pass which is important Of course for customer experience in today's world. Is there anything else that you would like to share today? Thank you for this opportunity and the only other thing I would like to tell our viewers is Feel free to visit our website and a lot of exciting things and if you have any questions if you feel We could collaborate in any way. We always open. We always happy to Walk with all of you. So look forward to hearing from a lot of you Yes, and that is air tail Dot I am yeah, so air tail dot I am Ronnie Thank you so much for joining us today here on JSA TV live from PTC 23 in sunny, Honolulu, Hawaii And thank you viewers for tuning in to another fabulous episode. I hope to see you again soon and Happy networking. Thank you