Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel Ltd has announced its decision to collaborate with Verizon Communications Inc’s BlueJeans to launch video conferencing tool that is focussed on businesses.
BlueJeans offers a cloud-based, interoperable video conference service that connects participants across a wide range of devices and conference platforms.
Bharti Airtel Limited, also known as Airtel, is an Indian global telecommunications services company that operates in 18 countries across South Asia and Africa.
Gopal Vittal, who is the India and South Asia CEO of Bharti Airtel said that the brand born out of the collaboration Airtel BlueJeans will store all its data in India and will be freely available to all business customers for three months.
With a majority of the people working from home due to the pandemic, they are depending on U.S based video conferencing tools like Zoom to connect with customers and colleagues. Bharti Airtel has identified the scope in the sector and the collaboration is an initiative based on this.
“This work from home trend and this increasing trend towards conferencing and collaborating from remote areas are only going to grow. So we believe that this is a very nascent market – the penetration is low and the opportunity is very large”, says Mr. Vittal.
The digital subsidiary of Reliance Industries Ltd has recently unveiled JioMeet, a videoconferencing app that provides free, 24-hour video conference calls to Indian users.
An Indian ban on 59 apps of Chinese origin has led many to encourage the use of local applications, echoing the call for economic self-reliance from Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
India had earlier termed Zoom as “not a protected forum,” and it released guidelines to prevent unauthorized users from committing malicious actions when using the app.
