 Hey everybody welcome welcome we are live here at itw 2023 this is itw extra powered by jsa tv we're at the national harbor in maryland right outside of dc i'm jamie scott okataya and joining me today i'm so honored to have vani vancatesh the ceo of global business for airtel business vani welcome back to jsa tv thank you jamie we are so excited to have you here so much going on of course this uh floor here at itw is just it's thriving it's it's so so much energy it's buzzing yes yes i'm so excited to be here have this industry just back in full force so many people so uh for our viewers who might not already know hopefully they do but can you just tell us a little bit about uh your tell business and what makes it such a unique organization yeah thanks thanks jamie and likewise firstly really lovely coming back here and the buzz is very palpable so really looking forward to the next couple of days here yeah so coming to airtel uh so uh we are a large company with the operations and licenses in india and africa and we have subsea cables across the world what we basically do is provide all connectivity and digital connectivity solutions to our customers across subsea cables terrestrial fibers in india in africa data centers cloud iot so we are pretty much known as a one-stop tech shop for our b2b enterprise customers a one stop shop and great added to uh incredible people on your team and uh incredible service so uh key key differentiators for sure and also you guys recently uh announced a channel partnership with bridge port at bridge point technologies yeah can you tell us a little bit more about your partnership yeah we are super excited about bridge point thanks for bringing that up jamie the reason we are super excited about bridge point is because we have a lord in india and africa and we find that a lot of our multinational customers actually want to grow in these uh geographies where the opportunities are very large the demographic dividend is very different lots of young population here right and what we believe is that with partners like bridge point we can actually bring what we have to offer to enterprise customers we don't have the reach and we are happy for specialists like bridge point but not just a channel partner for us they are actually a technology advisor uh to the enterprise customers to bring that back to india and africa so we are super excited in fact i just met uh mel of bridge point day before yesterday and uh we're super excited about this partnership oh well and talking about that bridge point partnership what your tail services will now be available to us customers and how will it access to these services benefit these businesses yeah great question jamie and so one is of course any cable requirement to get into india that we have limb capability to get into india and then we have data centers plus we have last mile access right so whether you want to get into india or africa or you want to be hosted in a data center there or you want to further be distributed through our terrestrial access all of that's available and i think the big piece for us is we have about 350 million customers in india and another 100 million customers in africa so that's the number of eyeballs that uh you know that's accessible through our network for us customers we are pretty excited about that and uh in africa in particular we're landing two cables we're landing ikwano and uh to africa over the next 18 months oh that's again another great opportunity for us enterprise customers yeah get to those eyeballs and really be handheld yeah by great air tail all right so uh you also have a unified platform we should mention for international voice sms d i d i t f s can you tell us a little bit more about air tail advantage so air tail advantage is a new portal that we launch and the idea is a lot of our customers wanted voice solutions but they wanted it in a very digital seamless way so they can easily go to a portal discover what is available figure out what they want and have the agility to change it as their requirements change and that's exactly what air tail advantage offers so again super excited to bring this so what we are really trying to do is we have a lot of network uh we have a lot of the solutions we have a lot of products as i mentioned we're trying to productize it so getting a lot of products and then platformize it so really make it easy for our customers to use it and air tail advantage is one step in that direction again that one stop shop like you discussed amazing amazing also you mentioned several times that large footprint in india and africa so many eyeballs can you tell us a little bit more about the solutions offered in those locations absolutely uh so uh like i mentioned we have about 400 000 kilometers of fiber across these places and in we present through our international pops in about 50 continents in five countries in india and africa alone we have 16 operating licenses mobile operating licenses so through this network we offer products which are around the cloud the data center the security c pass area we also offer iot solutions and we offer at tech solutions so there's a full stop shop across data center all data solutions activity solutions iot solutions cloud c pass so that's what we bring to bear for our customers the whole suite if you will and are you looking to expand into india or africa or both let's on the rise in there yeah so uh we are always looking for new investments uh we are pretty much we have huge coverage in india so we we are covered about 99.9 percent of the geography yeah africa we are scaling up massively uh but we are continuing to increase our investments manifold for two reasons because our customers now not just need the penetration but they also need diversity redundancy and they need different efficient solutions so we are ramping up our existing network with all of that and in africa in particular 4g is growing in a big way with two cable stations landing we expect the digital explosion to happen in africa over the next three to five years so that's something again we are investing ahead of time on itw as well right itw africa coming soon yeah okay so where can our viewers go to learn more about airtel business yeah so viewers can visit etel.in business and you will find the whole suite of our product solutions there and if viewers have any feedback we will be very very happy to learn and become better every other day so we would welcome any feedback on the portal on our products on our services on anything else you would want us to serve you with yeah you know one one thing that strikes me every time i speak with you in your team is that no matter how big the airtel reach is you guys make it feel so personal so thank you for that it is personal i think each and every customer of ours is very personal to us yeah but thanks thanks for the kind comment yeah truly thank you thank you and thank you viewers for tuning in to itw extra powered by jsa tv happy networking