Bharti Airtel shifts from outsourcing to insourcing

BANGALORE, INDIA: Bharti Airtel has taken a decision to acquire the entire stake of Alcatel Lucent India in Alcatel Lucent Managed Network Service India (ALMNS), a joint venture between Bharti and Alcatel Lucent India to manage and deploy the former's fixed line and broadband network in India thereby making a paradigm shift from outsourcing model to insourcing model. And this is applicable from immediate effect. So the big question is: Why is Bharti Airtel shifting from outsourcing to insourcing?

The joint venture for fixed and broadband services was formed in April 2009 and the focus was on managing Airtel's migration to Next Generation Networks (NGN) to offer advanced services like high-speed internet, triple play, media-rich VAS, MPLS, VPN for both retail and business customers. This was the first managed services partnership for broadband and telephone services in India.

ALMNS manages 3.3 million fixed line and 1.4 million broadband/internet subscribers of Bharti Airtel, spread across 87 cities across India.

Under the JV, Alcatel-Lucent was taking care of designing, planning, deploying, fault repair, optimizing and managing Bharti Airtel's broadband and telephone network across India. In the JV, Bharti Airtel had 26% stake and Alcatel-Lucent had 74% stake.

With Bharti buying Alcatel-Lucent stake in the joint venture, ALMNS would now be a 100% subsidiary of Bharti Airtel. And the company will not be able to leverage on Alcatel-Lucent's global expertise in IP transformation, managed network services, and network transformation. Also the onus of customer delivery and market growth will be now on Bharti Airtel only.

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