Bharti Airtel has awarded a contract to IBM to manage its African operations. As per the conditions, IBM will provide the operator with IT infrastructure to support 500 million customers globally.

According to Jai Menon, Group Director, IT, Bharti Enterprises, over the next six months, IBM will scale up Bharti Airtel’s global IT platform to support 300 million customers, after which it will be scaled up immediately to further accommodate 500 million users.

The operator is already in the process of moving several IT processes, solutions and concepts to Africa. It will first move the optimisation process, of bringing alignment between IT and businesses, followed by its model of running tiered data centres to Africa. “We identified Kenya and Nigeria as continent hubs. Then there will be smaller data centres in all countries,” said Menon.