Jio’s bid to win the business and cloud markets

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Editor's note: In January, Bharti Airtel Ltd, India’s second-largest telecom operator, first stitched together an agreement with Google Cloud, under which Airtel was to offer G Suite products, including Gmail, Docs, Drive and Calendar, to large, medium and small businesses. At the time, Airtel’s enterprise business comprised 2,500 large businesses and a little over 500,000 small businesses and startups, according to a press release by the company. Seven months later, in August, Airtel inked a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services to make most of its business customers switch to AWS’s cloud computing platform. Airtel’s announcement stated that the company served, in addition to over 2,500 large businesses, a little more than a million small and medium businesses and startups. So in this period, going by Airtel’s statements, it doubled its small-and-medium client base. At the same time, Airtel also made investments in four startups—Waybeo, Lattu Kids, Voicezen, and Spectacom. Finally, Airtel also got a $235 million investment from Carlyle Group Inc. in its data centre business, as the US-based private equity investor acquired a 25% stake in Airtel’s data centre business, …