'Technology is an enabler in your business' If you are running a business online, offline is mission critical because all your products are on air.

Bharti Airtel Ltd is India's leading and most trusted provider of ICT services among corporate businesses and entrepreneurs. Ashish Arora, CEO, Corporate Business, Bharti Airtel Ltd, shares the solutions Airtel has for entrepreneurs and the overall start-up ecosystem.

What kind of solutions Airtel has for entrepreneurs?

We are focusing on entrepreneurs in two ways. One is boxes and packages through which they can come and start a business– Office-in-a-box kinds of a plan where you can get all telecom requirements plugged in together at one go. This is for early-stage start-ups as they don't have funds for making big investments in technology. We have customised solutions for 23 different small segments like cab and fast-food industry. They scale very rapidly; they don't have ability to figure out what's the best platform for them. So we have created an end-to-end kind of a solution for them. Be it the network part of it or application part. We help them being absolutely at the cutting edge of technology in a short span of time.

Are these solutions affordable for start-ups?

It's absolutely affordable for start-ups. There's a full stack of packages you can choose from. If you don't want to be connected throughout the day, we have something like pay-per-use model where you have everything very-well defined in terms of response time when you are really running a critical application. Affordability has been the cornerstone of our growth from technology point of view.

Do you offer sector-specific solutions?

Segments and sectors don't matter because nowadays almost all entrepreneurs are running their businesses on a wire. They are running business out of mobiles and tabs. Their customers, supply chain and their competitors are on mobile so they themselves are. They are these new start-ups and upcoming companies which are built online. Most of them don't even exist in the offline mode. So their investments, their dependencies and their way of working are quite different from others. There is a spectrum of services. If you are running a business online, offline is mission critical because all your products are on air. So we deliver that kind of response time. We are not only serving start-ups, but also big clients and government departments. We have built our capabilities for the most critical part of the value chain. It's the same for rest of the ecosystem.

How does Airtel support entrepreneurship?

We have programmes for our own employees. In some cases, an employee wants to start some venture on his own. We have a programme to support such employees.Ashish