Airtel Business and IBM to deploy hybrid cloud solution for Milk Producer Companies

Airtel Business has now partnered with global technology firm IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud solution for a group of milk producer companies (MPC) via NDDB Dairy Services.

NDDB Dairy Services is not for profit organization that offers management and technical services to milk production companies.

Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO – Enterprise Business, Airtel Business, said, "Our endeavour is to enable enterprises to stay focused on their core businesses as we drive end-to-end digital transformation on their behalf. Clients are looking for solutions that are scalable and secured. Through the joint value proposition, we have offered producer companies a modern and secured data centre infrastructure to run their data-intensive workload on a hybrid cloud platform in a very cost-effective manner."

 Ravi Jain, Director - Server Sales, IBM India/South Asia, said, "We are witnessing a considerable surge in demand for highly secured and cutting-edge digital technology from enterprise and government organizations. IBM and Airtel will collaborate and complement each other's capabilities to address the growing needs of digital transformation of enterprises in India. We are glad to support Producer companies in their journey to the Cloud. Our engagement is aligned with the “Digital India” plans of the Government and to push for the large-scale adoption of digital platforms including direct payments to millions of farmers to their bank accounts." 

The five milk major producers include Maahi in Gujarat, Shreeja in Andhra Pradesh, Baani in Punjab, Saahaj in Uttar Pradesh, and Paayas in Rajasthan.

The hybrid cloud solution will utilize the Airtel Cloud, which will host the SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution hosted on the IBM Power Servers.

The migration to the Airtel-IBM cloud is expected to help the MPCs strengthen the support provided to the milk farmers.

It will help the producer companies to record and access major key information of members such as quantum of milk procured, the milk products made, sold, and the likes.

Most critically, the MPCs will be able to make direct digital payments to around 5 lakh affiliated milk farmers, whom Airtel said are from the small and marginal income groups. Around 25 liters of milk are contributed each day from more than 14000 villages in this regard.

The hybrid cloud solution platform is expected to offer better integration of operations and even allow for easier customization, better data control. IBM also said that it would help to migrate workloads from the IBM Power8 to IBM Power9 servers, with a scalability and reliability option for SAP S/4 HANA.