India’s one of the prominent telecom operators Airtel is apparently readying a new technology centre in Pune as a part of its growing in-house digital engineering capabilities. Once set up, it would mark the fourth digital technology hub in India from the company and the very first in the western part of the country. This could potentially be very advantageous for the company as well as the region, given the fact that 5G networks are arriving pretty soon.
Airtel Plans to Expand Further
The Chief Information Officer at Bharti Airtel, Pradipt Kapoor confirmed this news stating that Airtel is rapidly scaling up its in-house digital talent pool to support its transformation into a digital telco. He further added that Pune is an established IT and tech hub which makes it an obvious choice for Airtel to tap into the talent pool and also drive cross-industry collaboration.
As far as the technology centre is considered, the upcoming facility in Pune will initially be home to 500 digital engineering professionals. The company will be hiring candidates from multiple experiences and domains such as Big Data, Machine Learning, Dev Ops, Tech ops and more. As mentioned above, it will be the fourth digital hub from the company in India as it already has similar digital technology hubs in Gurgaon, Bengaluru (Airtel X-Labs) and Noida.
The three existing digital hubs from Airtel already employ somewhere about 3000 people making Airtel one of the largest tech employers outside of the IT industry. Airtel is not only hiring top candidates from Silicon Valley and domestic start-ups but is also hiring from engineering institutes like IITs, NITS, and IITs for its digital technology hubs.
The company over the last couple of decades has been investing significantly to create the finest digital infrastructure over which 40% of India’s economic and digital activity takes place and has already made investments worth more than $ 46 billion. For those unaware, Airtel’s popular digital assets like the Airtel Thanks app, Wynk Music app, and Airtel Xstream content platform with over 180mn MAUs have been fully developed by its in-house digital engineering teams.
