 Hello and welcome to JSA TV Live. We are the live streaming data source for news here at Data Cloud USA. We are in sunny Austin, Texas today on the floor at Data Cloud USA and I'm Keeley Dorian. Joining me right now, we have Narendh Donoram. He is the business development director for Airtel. Thank you so much for joining us and welcome to JSA TV Live. Nice to be here, Keeley. Thanks for having me. Welcome. Well, let's start right off with some good news. Actually, just this week, your subsidiary Nextra by Airtel had a really big announcement about using green energy, something we're hearing a lot about in the data center space lately. Can you just share some details about that announcement with us? Yeah, absolutely. I'm very excited about this announcement. Nextra data center is the largest data center provider in India and they have partnered with Bloom Energy to deploy fuel cell technology in India in its data centers and obviously to reduce the carbon emissions and also unlock the cost and sustainability benefits. And to start with, Nextra will be deploying natural gas and eventually migrate to hydrogen without any significant investment in the future. So Nextra data center has a vision of achieving net zero by 2031. In line with that, there is a lot of effort and initiatives with regard to sustainability. So the Nextra data center team has embarked on a journey to deploy new innovative energy solutions in India and they want to set new benchmarks in the Indian data center market because India is emerging as a lead destination in the APAC region in terms of data centers. And I'm very proud to say that Nextra data center is the first company in India to deploy fuel cell technology, right? And also Nextra data center has committed investments to the tune of 600 million plus US dollars to build more capacities, to increase the capacity by almost three X or a period of next three to four years time. It's always exciting to be leading the pack, that's for sure. Let's take a step back and talk just real quickly about Airtel, of course you're very well known across India for people in the US though, for US viewers who might not be familiar with Airtel. Can you just give us the quick overview of what Airtel is and what you do? Sure, absolutely. So Airtel is a leading Indian telecommunications company, service provider with global presence. And so Airtel generates about 14.5 billion dollars, US dollars in terms of annual revenues. And it's broadly classified into two groups, one is the consumer group and other one is the B2B group. On the consumer side, Airtel is presented about 17 countries in South Asia and Central Africa. And here's the fun fact, Airtel today has about 491 million wireless subscribers and that makes it the second largest wireless operator in the world. On the B2B side, Airtel is the provider of choice for the top enterprise customers, government customers and also the SME customers in India. And on the global front, Airtel caters to some of the top global carriers, OTTs across the globe. So that's on the global business side. And Airtel operates at a very massive scale in terms of infrastructure. It operates about 12, owns and operates about 12 hyperscale data centers in India. And it has about 120 H data centers. On the network side, Airtel owns about 355 K route kilometers of fiber, terrestrial fiber, and about 365 K of subsea fiber network, connecting about 200 of its global pops, right? So Airtel offers a wide portfolio of services ranging from data center co-location, managed services, network connectivity, IP transit, CDN, collaboration services, cyber security, and also cloud solutions. So Airtel is very uniquely positioned in terms of owning data center assets, in terms of owning network assets, and also the eyeballs, both B2B and the consumer eyeballs. So that's the biggest value that we bring on the table for our global customers. Definitely a wide footprint and a lot going on. So you were talking a little while ago about sustainability and a lot of the sustainability efforts that Airtel and Nexra by Airtel have. I would just like to ask you generally, because we're hearing a lot about sustainability and data centers here at Data Cloud, and then just across the industry right now. You know, there are some markets that have very stringent policies that data centers are having to put into place, California for one, here in the US, and then of course other markets globally. How do you think that is setting up companies like yours and others in the industry to innovate and do better and put better practices into place, and how does that just help us overall? That's a great question, Kili. In fact, sustainability is the biggest, it's the hot topic today in the data center industry. I see in this conference, a lot of people are talking about sustainability. And yes, as more and more data center companies are inclined towards deploying sustainable solutions, I think the regulators are becoming more and more important to the data center industry. And yes, California has always led the nation in terms of developing and implementing new sustainability policies. And yes, Singapore also was an early adapter of renewable solutions, but they did the biggest thing of switching from fossil-based to natural gas. And of course, the European Union also passed a lot of regulations and the reason passed I think in 2020. You know, they came down quite heavily on all the data center companies and they've even kept a target of going carbon neutral by I think 2030 or something like that. I think these stricter regulations are definitely having an impact on the data center industry as a whole. And coming back to our market, this is definitely spilling over. And the Indian government has got an ambitious plan of going 50% clean energy by 2030. That's quite an aggressive timeline, but I think we are already headed in the direction. And also the data center ecosystem in India is adopting quite well to this change. And now companies are looking at alternative renewable energy sources. They are getting more efficient on the power utilization, they're optimizing power consumption and they're innovating new innovative technologies. And of course, trying to reduce the PUE, right? So yeah, definitely it's having a strong impact on the data center industry as a whole. And next to itself, as I mentioned earlier, we have a vision of going net zero by 2031. And you're being recognized for your sustainability initiatives, among other things, I should say congratulations because Airtel was recently named as a finalist in the Global Carrier Awards for the best ESG or Environmental, Social and Government, governmental excuse me initiative, as well as best security. So congratulations, and can you just share a little bit about why you were nominated in those two categories? Yeah, sure. So as you know, this Global Carrier Award is happening in London next month and we are very excited about it. And we got nominated in two categories. One is of course the ESG initiative. And Airtel has taken a number of initiatives on the ESG space. We have implemented some of the global best practices in our data center and the network businesses and of course we are all the time innovating, trying to bring in some new innovative technologies, the fuel cell being one such example. So all that combined, I think we have got a spot in the nomination and I'm really looking forward to this event. And the second nomination is on the security innovation. We presented our ISOC, which is the security knock, ISOC capabilities. So we have rolled out a next gen ISOC platform and we have something like about 10 plus offerings for our enterprise customers. So this is something very innovative in a market like India. So that's what got us into the nomination list. So I'm very excited about it and hopefully we should see something coming up. Well, where can we stay tuned and how can we just generally keep up with what's happening with Airtel? Okay, so you can, for Airtel, you can go to Airtel.in oblique global business. And for data centers, you can go to Airtel www.nexta.in. Well, great, lots of great things happening. So congratulations on a good year so far and we'll watch out for plenty more to come this year and into next year. In the meantime, thanks so much, Naren, for stopping by JSA TV. Enjoy the rest of data cloud and thank you for tuning in to JSA TV Live and as always, happy networking.