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Bharti, Cisco, and Servion join hands to offer Hosted Contact Center Services

New Delhi, 10 June, 2010

First of its kind consortium offers highly flexible and customizable solution

A consortium of Bharti Airtel, Cisco, and Servion today announced their foray into the Indian hosted Contact Center services market valued at USD 50 Million with the launch of India’s first ‘customizable’ hosted Contact Center services.

This hosted Contact Center solution for large, medium, and small enterprises offers freedom from technology obsolescence, capital investments, and continuity challenges while leveraging the capability to customize the solution based on business requirements. The consortium targets acquiring 5000 ports / seats in the first year.

Improving customer service and cutting costs are everlasting business goals, regardless of the economic climate. With capital expense budgets shrinking, organizations are seeking innovative approaches to achieve these goals. Hosted Contact Center solutions offer access to technology without having to buy software licenses, hardware, building infrastructure, and dedicating IT resources to implementing, maintaining, and upgrading the technologies. That can mean plenty of cost savings and flexibility. Hosted Contact Center solutions are faster and less expensive to implement than customer premise-based Contact Centers, and require no ongoing capital equipment or maintenance fee investment.

On this initiative, Mr. Milan Rao, CEO, Enterprise Services - Bharti Airtel, said “We are very happy to partner with Servion and Cisco. This alliance is in line with our philosophy to partner with industry leaders. We are committed to offer state-of-the-art solutions that enhance productivity and minimize costs for our customers. There is a great potential for Call Center solutions over a hosted platform as it promises huge benefits for enterprises across different verticals”.

“We understand that the business challenges each organization face are unique. A ‘one size fits all solution’ will not be effective under such circumstances. Hence we brought in the capability to customize these solutions”, explains Mr. K. Balakrishnan, Managing Director and CEO of Servion Global Solutions. “The consortium combines the best of three worlds – reach and brand of Bharti Airtel communication network, technology leadership of Cisco, and domain expertise and integration capabilities of Servion in offering a tailor made hosted Contact Center solution to the enterprise customer” he adds.

“The tough economic climate has brought about the need for innovative solutions and consumption models and the hosted contact center model is a great example of one. Cisco, Bharti Airtel and Servion are coming together today to offer a truly transformational solution that factors in the vital business imperatives of agility and scale, in times like this,” said Vikram Sharma, Head – Managed Services, Cisco India & SAARC. He added, “In addition to bringing the benefits of converged voice, mobile and data services to every desktop in the organisation, the offering allows businesses to dramatically reduce upfront investment, while accelerating the adoption of unified communications on a global scale”.

In addition to the features that are available for any high end premise based Contact Center solution – self service, inbound, outbound, and international conferencing capabilities, the hosted Contact Center solution offers the domain expertise to customize applications, performance monitoring, infrastructure, skill sets, technology adoption and financial investments.

About Bharti Airtel Limited : Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is a leading emerging markets telco with operations in 18 countries across Asia and Africa. The company has over 180 million customers across its operations.

Bharti Airtel has been ranked among the six best performing technology companies in the world by Business Week. Bharti Airtel is structured as four strategic business units - Mobile, Telemedia, Enterprise and Digital TV. The mobile business offers services in 18 countries across Asia and Africa. The Telemedia business provides broadband, IPTV and telephone services in 89 Indian cities. The Enterprise business provides end-to-end telecom solutions to corporate customers and national and international long distance services to carriers. The Digital TV business provides DTH services across India. All these services are provided under the Airtel brand (excluding Bangladesh and Africa). Airtel's international network infrastructure includes ownership of the i2i submarine cable system and consortium ownership in five global undersea cable systems, SEA-ME-WE 4, EIG, I-ME-WE, AAG and UNITY.

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