India’s Airtel partners with Microsoft Azure, launches private connection service Connexion

The Indian-based global telecommunications service company Bharti Airtel just made a significant investment in its cloud infrastructure and future according to the Economic Times. Joining forces with Microsoft, Airtel’s new business platform titled Connexion and powered in part by Azure Express Route will offer “a more secure, scalable and seamless private connection between enterprises, cloud service providers, and data center partners.”

As Airtel operates in 20 countries across South Asia, Africa and the Channel Islands with over 325 million subscribers, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform has once again proven to be enticing in both scale and performance for larger business partnerships. Airtel’s director and CEO of global business Ajay Chitkara explains:

…with Connexion, we are confident of helping customers seamlessly and more securely connect to Microsoft Azure, by bringing down their network cost substantially and improving performance.

The specifics of Microsoft’s and Airtel’s partnership enables Airtel’s customers to create private connections between their infrastructures and Azure date centers. The result of allowing such singular pathways exemplifies Microsoft’s expansion of services in India and its other global audiences through its continued focus on strategic partnerships and reducing the complexity of its service stacks.

Microsoft’s Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer of networking for Microsoft Azure on the company’s expansion:

Enterprises are increasingly leveraging the power of the cloud to empower their workforces and Microsoft is expanding its services for India and global customers. Our partnership with Airtel, the third largest global carrier, is a major step in this direction, and we hope to bring in an integrated and seamless experience for our mutual customers.”

As of now, a few specifics on the matter still present some unanswered questions such as when the new Connexion service will exactly be available for customers or how the new agreement affects Airtel’s previous 2015 announcement of Amazon Web Services powering its private network solutions.

This will help Airtel’s enterprise customers across the globe leverage the power of AWS Direct Connect to establish a dedicated network connection between customers’ premises and Amazon’s data centers – thus helping them reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and experience a more consistent network connectivity.”

While smart businesses shop the best solutions for a wide array of topics and issues, it seems reasonable that neither AWS or Microsoft’s Azure teams want to share space as Airtel’s cloud and hybrid solutions for its customers.