Bharti Airtel Ltd Ties Up With Microsoft Corp To Sell Office 365 To SMEs Via Cloud Computing-The Economic Times

The Economic Times reported that in a sign of the increasing role being played by telecom operators in the emerging cloud computing ecosystem, India's telco Bharti Airtel Limited has tied up with Microsoft Corp to sell the software giant's office productivity suite to small and medium businesses in India. For Airtel, the partnership will help boost intent to derive a larger portion of revenue from data services and for Microsoft, the tie-up will give it easy access to a pool of potential customers in India who prefer to pay for software based on what they use instead of the traditional model of high upfront investment for licences. As part of the contract, Microsoft will sell Office 365 Software - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote - as a service, with the actual software hosted on from Bharti Airtel's data centres.