Dr. Jai Menon - Bharti’s Group Director of Innovation and IT was recently in the country as one of a 20 member delegation from India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM). In an exclusive interview with CIO East Africa, he shared insights on the plans Airtel has for Africa.

Menon says that Airtel will be offering a rich portfolio of hybrid services such as 3G, WiFi and LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks. “All this will be wrapped with high quality customer care, whether through IVR (Interactive Voice Response) or call centres,” Menon says. Airtel will also be offering self service through SMS and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD).
Airtel will continue to facilitate and create excellent commerce services through Airtel Money (formerly Zap). For small businesses, Airtel will be offering cloud services through Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.
All these services will be backed by a best-in-class partner ecosystem. These include Airtel’s IT partners and network partners including Ericsson, NokiaSiemens and Huawei.
Airtel is working an exciting content portal which will be known as Airtel Live and as well as innovations like mobile advertising, says Menon. Airtel Live will include music, wall papers, ringtones and application stores. The firm will build a strong developer community and expose Application Programming Interfaces which is expected to bring in more applications. Menon however did not disclose who Airtel’s mobile advertising partner would be.
Airtel will soon be establishing a data centre of undisclosed capacity at KDNs recently launched data centre. [KDN launches its Data Centre: http://www.cio.co.ke/Main-Stories/kdn-launches-its-new-data-center.html]