25 July, 2020: By Ajoy Maitra
After the ban on China's applications, most of the sectors are encouraged to replace their share with Chinese companies. Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Tuesday renewed its agreement with Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson to provide pan-India managed network operations through Ericsson Operations Engine.

With Worldwide adoption of technology and further advancements to Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence along with cloud computing, it has become the need of the hour for the industries to extract insights from their vast datasets, make it easier to resolve issues, manage daily business more efficiently and provide improved customer service and satisfaction with the adoption of latest technological upgrades.
Telecoms possess enormous amounts of data from customers. With the use of AI and machine learning, telecoms can extract meaningful business insights from this data so they can make faster and better business decisions. This crunching of the data by AI helps with customer segmentation, customer churn prevention, to predict the lifetime value of the customer, product development, improving margins, price optimization, and more.

Amid heightened anti-China sentiments in India, Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson has said it hopes to win contracts in the Indian telecom market on the strength of its technology leadership, and added that as a practice, the company does not base business plans on matters not under its control. Airtel and Ericsson's technologies and services partnership has spanned 2G, 3G and 4G provisions, and more recently, live 5G trials.
The three-year deal will see Airtel launching Ericsson Operations Engine during 2020. Ericsson will deploy the latest automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enhance Airtel's mobile network performance and customer experience. It will also manage Airtel's network operation centres and field maintenance activities across India.

Randeep Sekhon, chief technology officer, Bharti Airtel, said: "We are pleased to strengthen our deep partnership with Ericsson as part of our vision to build a future-ready network that enables world-class experience for our customers. We are confident the new technologies will enable us to serve emerging data requirements of customers in a digitally-connected India."
Nunzio Mirtillo, head of Ericsson Southeast Asia, Oceania and India, said: "Ericsson Operations Engine consolidates our position as the industry leader in network managed services. With over 300 global contracts, Ericsson has proven capabilities in managing multi-vendor and multi-technology networks. This agreement demonstrates the continued confidence in our products and solutions in Bharti Airtel's network and IT operations."

With this, India too has made its security concerns around Huawei clear, especially in the wake of the heightened border tensions with China. New Delhi has already barred state-run carriers from sourcing equipment from Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE, and is believed to have informally nudged private telcos to replace Chinese equipment over time, without disrupting consumer services.
Ericsson India head Nitin Bansal said that the company remains "very confident" of its technology prowess. Bansal was responding to a question on whether the anti-China sentiments in the country would provide a competitive edge to non-Chinese gear vendors in Indian telecom market, where data and voice consumption patterns are charting new highs.

"We do not base our business plans on things which we cannot control, we believe in technology leadership. And, if you see globally, we have been winning on our technology leadership", Bansal told PTI.